How To Create A Comprehensive And Effective Pupil Premium Strategy: 10 Methods To Develop Your Strategy Statement

Every school with more than five eligible pupils must publish a pupil premium strategy statement showing how it spends the grant on disadvantaged pupils. The deadline is 31st December each year.

This guide sets out what schools must publish, what changes for the pupil premium grant in 2026, and ten methods school leaders can use to build an effective pupil premium strategy.

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What is a pupil premium strategy?

A pupil premium strategy is the plan a school makes for spending its pupil premium funding on disadvantaged pupils, and the strategy statement is the published document that sets it out.

Pupil premium funding has been running since April 2011, and the rules behind it have changed several times since.

Who gets pupil premium in the 2026 to 2027 academic year?

Three groups of pupils attract the grant. The large majority are pupils eligible for free school meals now or at any point in the past six years. The second group is children looked after by a local authority, and children who have previously been looked after. The third is service children, whose parents serve in the armed forces.

Funding for looked-after children goes to the local authority, and the virtual school head manages it. Everything else is paid to the school.

Pupil premium funding in 2026/27

For 2026 to 2027 the pupil premium funding rates are £1,550 for each eligible primary-aged pupil and £1,100 for each eligible secondary-aged pupil. Looked-after and previously looked-after children receive £2,690, and service children receive £360. The grant is paid in four instalments across the financial year.

Your allocation depends on who appeared on the October census, not on who is on roll today. Some eligible children are harder to identify than others, particularly those previously in care or adopted. Communicating regularly with parents and carers is the most reliable way to find them.

What changes for pupil premium in 2026

Two changes are worth building into your strategy now.

Free school meals eligibility expands in September 2026

Every child in a household on Universal Credit becomes entitled to a free meal, which the government estimates will reach over half a million more children.

Free school meals then splits in two. Targeted free school meals keeps the £7,400 household income threshold. Expanded free school meals covers every family above it and applies to meals only. Only targeted free school meals counts towards Ever 6, the six-year eligibility window.

So more children will eat a free meal, and no additional funding follows them. Pupils already in the Ever 6 cohort keep their place for six years, so nothing changes immediately. From 2027 to 2028, as that cohort ages out, your pupil premium numbers will start to narrow.

How disadvantage funding is targeted

In December 2025 the government said it intends to design a new model for targeting disadvantage funding, using household income data rather than free school meals eligibility. No implementation date has been published.

The DfE recommends a three-year strategy. Both changes land inside that window, so the cohort you are planning for in 2027 will not be the cohort you are funded for today.

Ring-fenced tutoring money has also gone. The National Tutoring Programme closed after 2023 to 2024, and recovery premium ended alongside it, with the recovery premium guidance withdrawn in September 2024. Tutoring remains a recommended approach, and schools now fund it from the pupil premium grant under targeted academic support.

Why do schools need a pupil premium strategy statement?

Schools are accountable for spending the grant in a way that improves educational outcomes for disadvantaged pupils and narrows the distance between them and their peers. The pupil premium strategy statement is where a school sets out that spending and what it achieved.

The attainment gap the grant exists to close is still widening. The Education Policy Institute’s 2026 annual report puts the disadvantage gap at 4.9 months by the end of Reception, 10.0 months by the end of Year 6 and 19.0 months by the end of Year 11. The early years gap is the widest recorded for over a decade.

Research published by the EEF and EPI in June 2026 found that 44% of the GCSE attainment gap already exists by age 11, so the attainment gap at secondary school inherits is largely built before Year 7. Early intervention therefore does more for pupil outcomes than the same work later, and both primary and secondary schools can plan around that finding.

Disadvantage compounds in maths faster than in most subjects. A pupil who has not secured place value struggles with fractions, then with everything resting on fractions, and the distance from their peers grows each year. A gap picked up in Year 2 takes less teaching time to close than the same gap picked up in Year 6.

Schools with five eligible pupils or fewer do not need to publish a statement. Multi-academy trusts can pool funding and run strategies across academies, but each academy publishes its own.

Each strategy should focus on the challenges having the biggest effect on your pupils, and on the ones your school is able to control. A statement also helps school leaders see which approaches are not making a difference, so they can stop them.

“Everything works somewhere: nothing works everywhere.”

Educationalist Dylan Wiliam

Pupil premium strategy statement guidance for school leaders

Raising attainment is rarely straightforward, and the statement keeps schools accountable for trying. The activities you list should be evidence-informed activities, chosen to reflect the specific challenges your eligible pupils face. A strategy that works in another school will not automatically work in yours.

The Department for Education’s conditions of grant permit you to spend the funding:

• For the benefit of pupils registered at the school that receives it
• For the benefit of pupils at other state-funded schools, for example a summer school that welcomes pupils from elsewhere
• On community services that further the benefit of pupils at the school, for example art therapy outside the classroom, or training local authority staff on the needs of looked-after children

The conditions of grant also allow some exceptions. Pupils who are not eligible, such as young carers, can benefit where there is a case for it, and the same applies to young people leaving care. Whole-class approaches and professional development that reach non-disadvantaged pupils are permitted, as long as the eligible pupils the funding was allocated for also benefit. Looked-after children’s funding can be pooled across a local authority.

Funding cannot replace services the local authority is responsible for, such as school uniform or free school transport.

Where looked-after children are involved, work with your local virtual school head when you write the statement.

Menu of approaches

Every funded activity must also sit within the government’s three-tier menu of approaches.

1. High quality teaching: This tier covers developing teaching, assessment and a broad curriculum, and professional development for school staff, including mentoring and coaching. It also covers recruiting and retaining teachers, and the technology and resources that support strong classroom practice, like diagnostic assessment software.
2. Targeted academic support: This tier covers one-to-one, small group or peer tuition, and targeted intervention for language development, literacy and numeracy. It also covers support for disadvantaged pupils with SEND, and deploying teaching assistants to deliver structured intervention.
3. Wider strategies: This tier covers attendance work, extra-curricular activities, extended school time, breakfast clubs and communication with parents. These address the non-academic barriers that hold pupil progress back. In primary settings, language development work often sits across both this tier and targeted academic support.

The balance between the three tiers depends on your pupils. The EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit is a reliable set of resources for comparing approaches, and it reports the months of additional progress each one delivers. High quality teaching sits at the top of the menu, because improving what happens in every lesson reaches disadvantaged pupils and their peers alike. Effective feedback is one of the strongest and cheapest approaches available to any school.

Using pupil premium for one to one tutoring

Many schools put targeted support into one-to-one tutoring, which is among the best-evidenced approaches available. Cost is what stops most schools offering it widely. At around £45 a session, tutoring ten pupils weekly costs more than £16,000 across the academic year, so the budget ends up deciding who receives support.

Third Space Learning has worked on that problem since 2013. Skye, our AI maths tutor built by teachers, delivers weekly one-to-one lessons on a fixed annual price. Primary schools start from £3,500 a year and secondary schools from £5,000, and the price stays the same however many pupils or sessions a school adds. One multi-academy trust took pupil premium maths tutoring from 15 Year 11 pupils to four schools on that basis.

Pupil premium accountability

Ofsted and the DfE both hold schools to account for the impact of the pupil premium grant, and the education and progress of eligible pupils is a key focus for inspectors. School leadership is judged partly on how well it manages that spending.

Ofsted has inspected under a new framework since 10 November 2025. There is no longer an overall effectiveness grade. Inspectors grade separate evaluation areas on a five-point scale, from Exceptional through Strong Standard, Expected Standard and Needs Attention to Urgent Improvement, and safeguarding is judged separately as met or not met. Findings are published as a report card.

Inclusion runs through the framework, and disadvantaged pupils sit inside it alongside pupils with SEND and children known to social care. From September 2026 inspectors work to updated guidance on gathering evidence about disadvantaged pupils’ attainment and progress, and a statistical model groups similar schools so achievement can be compared fairly. Evidence about your disadvantaged pupils therefore carries more weight with inspectors than it did under the previous framework.

Schools with six or more eligible pupils must publish an updated strategy statement each academic year. Publishing an updated strategy statement means reviewing last year’s plan and revising the parts that need it. Schools do not have to start again each year. For 2026 to 2027 the deadline is 31st December 2026. The DfE reviews a sample of published pupil premium strategy statements, and provides templates for primary and secondary schools.

Each statement gives contextual information about your setting, your pupil premium grant allocation, and the number of pupils eligible under each criterion. It comes in two parts.

Part A: the plan

Start with a statement of intent that says what you want to achieve and the principles behind it. Name the key focus areas for the year. Schools commonly invest in raising attainment in the core subjects, since progress in the core subjects drives most published measures. Others invest in developing teaching quality, enriching educational experience, and improving attendance.

Set out the challenges faced by disadvantaged pupils in your setting, and link your intended outcomes to the data you already collect on attainment, attendance and suspensions. Define the success criteria you will evaluate against.

Then list the individual actions, grouped into the three tiers:

1. High quality teaching
2. Targeted academic support
3. Wider strategies

Find schools performing well in a similar context to yours, and read their pupil premium strategy statements to see what they do.

Part B: review of the previous academic year

This is a high-level summary of what your last pupil premium strategy achieved. Include national assessment and qualification data, EBacc entry data for secondary schools, comparison against local and national averages, and outcomes for your non-disadvantaged pupils. Add your own summative and formative assessment, and any school data on attendance, behaviour and wellbeing.

Say plainly whether you are on track, and name the outcomes you did not achieve as well as the ones you did. The DfE publishes anonymised examples, and other schools’ published statements are worth reading.

10 methods to develop your pupil premium strategy

The strategy statement summarises your pupil premium strategy in a few published pages, and the work behind it runs across the whole school year. These ten methods cover how to build that work.

1. Get the governing body on board

Name a governor responsible for pupil premium, and make sure they understand the strategy well enough to question you about it. A small primary school with few disadvantaged pupils may find governors asking why those children get additional support. School leaders need both the moral argument and the accountability one.

2. Consider the individuals, not just the statistics

Whole-cohort data is quicker to review than the circumstances of individual pupils. Take the time to know each pupil in receipt of the grant, and talk to their class teachers about what a typical day looks like. Some pupils are a long way behind their peers academically; others are close but rarely in school. What worked for one cohort will not automatically work for the next.

3. High quality teaching

Tier 1 of the menu is high quality teaching, and your statement should evidence it clearly. Teaching built on how children learn tends to have a disproportionate effect on disadvantaged pupils, and specific feedback is one of the cheapest ways to get it.

Think carefully about who teaches your pupil premium children. Lower sets often contain a disproportionate number of eligible pupils, and they benefit most from your strongest teachers. Primary leaders should weigh this when deciding class allocation each year.

4. Build a change team across academic and pastoral

The challenges disadvantaged pupils face rarely sit in one part of school life, so the response has to run across academic and pastoral staff together. Pupils spend only part of the day with their class teacher. They also need pastoral support, middle leaders, attendance officers and sometimes governors.

A team also spots behaviour trends early. Young people without positive role models outside school need clear boundaries, and making exceptions for them inside behaviour systems does not help them. Policies should tackle the underlying challenges instead. Have an accountable senior leader or pupil premium lead chair the group, so leadership of the strategy sits with one named person.

5. Identify the challenges in your setting through structured conversations

Look across the whole school and ask what your eligible pupils are up against. Attendance, prior attainment and confidence are the usual places to focus first. Structured conversations with staff, and particularly with the class teachers who see these pupils every day, will tell you more than the data alone. Once you know the specific needs, allocating the budget gets easier.

6. Match your plan to the challenge and to your context

New approaches are tempting, but they are not always right for your setting. Your statement should show plans that address the challenges you identified. If disadvantaged pupils in your school are more likely to be persistently absent, your strategy should carry things that tackle attendance, such as a breakfast club. Be ready to explain to governors and inspectors why you chose each approach.

7. Identify trends

Every cohort differs, and patterns still emerge. Look across at least three years of assessment data to see what recurs in your context, and use it to judge whether an intervention is working, needs amending, or should stop. Trends also show you where pupil premium spending has had a significant impact and where it has not.

8. Use the EEF’s guide to implementation

Most pupil premium strategies fail during implementation, when a well-designed plan turns out to be more than staff can run. Effective implementation means thinking through what an approach looks like in your setting and how realistically staff can run it. Many successful schools keep the same priorities year after year and make small adjustments, which gives staff time to get good at them.

9. Training and professional development for staff

Gaps in staff skills will limit any strategy, so build ongoing professional development around the approaches you have chosen. This belongs under tier 1 in your statement.

Tell school staff what the strategy is and what the culture around it should be, and make sure middle leadership can explain it too. Everyone should hold high expectations for eligible pupils. Fold the strategy into your School Improvement Plan, and write its aims into appraisal and teacher development.

10. Evaluate the strategies and identify the impact

Evaluation is an ongoing process that runs through the whole academic year. Leaving it until the summer term means you find out too late to change anything. Assess each intervention against the outcomes you set, and if it is not having the impact you wanted, amend it or stop it. Teacher workload is already heavy, and asking staff to keep doing something with no measurable effect helps nobody. Schools that do this well tend to end up running fewer approaches and running them properly, and that is what success looks like here.

Put any new approach through a workload audit that covers the resources and the staff time it needs. You may want to consider: 

• Is it effective? 
• Do teachers have the right training for the strategy to work? 
• Do you need to implement CPD or extra support for ECTs? 

Pupil premium strategy FAQs