Service Pupil Premium

At Harestock there are usually between 44 – 54 Service Children on roll at any given time. For each of these children the school receives the Service Pupil Premium (SPP).

The DfE state, ‘eligible schools receive the SPP so that they can offer mainly pastoral support during challenging times and to help mitigate the negative impact on service children of family mobility or parental deployment.’

We spend our SPP in a variety of ways the following paragraphs explain in more detail how this money is allocated throughout the school.

Currently, we employ a member of staff to liaise with schools before a child arrives at Harestock and when transitioning to a new school.  As soon as we know when the family are being deployed and relocated, we liaise with the receiving school, wherever that may be in the UK, or overseas. We spend time with them, looking at the area they are moving to and their new school online to prepare them for the move. We appreciate that moves can be unexpected and at short notice.

This member of staff is available before and after school for support and advice face to face with parents, or they liaise with parents over the phone or via email whenever information or support is needed at other times.

We employ an additional Assistant at both Breakfast club and After School club to enable pastoral support to happen if and when it is needed for Service children who attend. We have recently extended Breakfast club hours to start at 7.45am on request of our service parents, this enables them to be at work for an 8am start.

We employ a qualified Counsellor and ‘Emotional Literacy Support’ Assistant (ELSA) who work with specific children across the school, including service children, on a variety of needs to ensure their emotional well-being is supported and developed when necessary.

Some of the funding is used to ensure every class have Learning Support Assistants every morning to provide intervention to specific children, including service children, especially when gaps start to appear, predominately in maths when coming to Harestock from overseas or when regular deployment has meant parts of the curriculum have not been able to be embedded. Learning Support Assistants are also able to provide daily pastoral support and guidance to children when they need it, at the start of the school day and during the morning. This is particularly useful for children whose parent has been deployed or who are going to be deployed shortly or just experiencing difficult times.

An ‘English as an Additional Language’ (EAL) coordinator is also employed to oversee the provision in and out of class for children with English as an additional language and to liaise with Hampshire County Council’s Ethnic Minority service for additional support and guidance in the child’s and parent’s first language when needed.

I hope this breakdown shows you how effectively we use the SSP to support our Service Children at Harestock.