Preparing for Pupil Premium Plus

Many of you who are responsible for improving the lives of children in care will have welcomed the recent unveiling of the Pupil Premium Plus. The initiative will see the funding available for local authorities to invest in extra education support for every child in care increase to £1,900 per annum from April 2014/15.
 
According to the latest figures, just 15.5 per cent of children in care achieve A* to C grade GCSEs in English and maths, compared with 58.7 per cent of their peers. And just 6 per cent of care leavers go to university, compared with 38 per cent of all young people. The key aim of the Pupil Premium Plus is to close the attainment gap between children and young people in care and other pupils.
 
While the final details are yet to be released, it seems likely that virtual school heads in local authorities will be expected to demonstrate that the additional money is reaching the right children – and that it is being spent on schemes that make a real difference to their educational achievement.
 
So what can councils do to help ensure their virtual school heads can track the impact of the Pupil Premium Plus on outcomes for children in care?
 
Aiming higher
One of the challenges for many authorities is that the children in care they are responsible for are often attending a variety of different educational settings, both inside and outside the local area.
 
The circumstances of these children can often change very quickly too so it’s vital that virtual school heads have access to the most up-to-date information on their attendance, achievement and conduct in school, regardless of where they are based.
 
What virtual school heads need is the ability to gather the latest information on children in care from all settings and have it displayed in a single ‘dashboard’ on their desk. They could then see at a glance if a child has moved house, not turned up for lessons that day or has started to fall behind in English.  
 
And what if they could compare the progress of virtual school students with their peers, week by week through every stage of their education with a few clicks of a mouse? This would enable them to intervene quickly and put services in place to boost the achievement of these vulnerable children sooner.
 
Being able to view more details of a child’s school history would make it easier for virtual school heads to demonstrate the considerable progress some children make in their education too – sometimes in simply returning to the achievement levels they reached before their circumstances changed.
 
The good news is, the IT required to do all this already exists. And it is already being used by virtual school heads in some authorities.
 
Adding value
The launch of the Pupil Premium Plus suggests that improving outcomes for children in care is a high priority for the government.
 
Whether the money is invested in one to one tuition to boost children’s reading skills in the early years or an after school maths club to prepare them for GCSE, it will support authorities in putting imaginative and effective initiatives in place to help ensure children in care go on to lead successful and fulfilling adult lives.