Premium Spend
“Children who grow up in disadvantaged circumstances often have fewer opportunities to learn at home and so come to school with less knowledge. A knowledge rich curriculum can help to compensate for what their peers from more advantaged backgrounds have acquired”
The Great Education debate 2019

Key staff with responsibility for Pupil Premium:
Mrs K Thomas (Senior Assistant Headteacher)
The Government believes the Pupil Premium, which is additional to main school funding, is the best way to address the current underlying inequalities between children eligible for free school meals (FSM) and their peers, by ensuring funding to tackle disadvantage, reaches the pupils who need it most.
It is for schools to decide how the Pupil Premium is spent, since they are best placed to assess what additional provision should be made for the individual pupils within their responsibility.
At Notre Dame, we find Pupil Premium an essential component to our school funding, which allows us to introduce, analyse and build strategies which ensure our students, in receipt of the grant, have a complete educational experience attain their full potential and the ‘gap’ between them and their peers is ‘narrowed’.
As a school, we focus our approach around the following six strategies:
- Priority seating
- Targeted questioning
- Effective and timely feedback
- Praise and reward
- Meta-cognition and self-regulation
- Regular reading opportunities
We aim to diminish the gap in achievement between those students who may be disadvantaged and those who are not.
- Download 2022/25 Strategy Statement
- Review of Strategy 2021
- Review of Strategy 2020
- Download 2019/22 Report
- Download 2018/19 Report
Key staff with responsibility for catch-up premium:
Mr G Walker (Assistant Headteacher c/o Literacy)
Mrs K Thomas (Senior Assistant Headteacher c/o Numeracy)
The literacy and numeracy catch up premium gives state-funded schools, including special schools and alternative provision settings, additional funding to support Year 7 pupils who did not achieve the expected standard in reading or maths at the end of Key Stage 2.
In 2017 to 2018, funding to schools will be allocated on the basis that they receive the same overall amount of Year 7 catch up premium funding they received in 2016 to 2017. It will be adjusted to reflect the percentage change in the size of their Year 7 cohort, based on the October 2017 census.
Key staff with responsibility for the Catch Up Premium:
Mrs K Thomas (Senior Assistant Headteacher)
The government announced £1 billion of funding to support children and young people to catch up lost time after school closure. This is especially important for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged backgrounds. This funding includes:
- a one-off universal £650 million catch up premium for the 2020 to 2021 academic year to ensure that schools have the support they need to help all pupils make up for lost teaching time
- a £350 million National Tutoring Programme to provide additional, targeted support for those children and young people who need the most help, which includes:
- a schools programme for 5 to 16-year-olds – for more information, see the National Tutoring Programme FAQs
- a 16 to 19 tuition fund
- an oral language intervention programme for reception-aged children
Notre Dame Catholic College use this funding for specific activities to support pupils to catch up for lost teaching over the previous months, in line with the curriculum expectations for the next academic year.