The GCSE 2025 data demonstrates that our PP students achieve highly and significantly above national averages; the APS was 7.8 for non-PP students compared to 7.7 for PP students. There has been a reduction of any gap in the last 3 years across several individual subjects and our priority is to continue using our embedded strategies to raise the achievement of all students and narrow the gap wherever possible between non-pupil premium students and pupil premium students.

During the academic year 2024-25, the PPG was used in a variety of ways to consistently maintain high levels of attainment and ensure that any gap in APS between PP and non-PP is narrowed wherever possible. This has included staff CPD to embed growth mindset, active participation, oracy skills and developing a new Assessment and Reporting policy. As a result, it reinforced aspects of our School Development Plan: providing excellent teaching and learning, character development and wellbeing support for all students to thrive. Further to this the Art department have now organised for home Art packs to support skills development outside of the classroom.

Lesson drop-ins demonstrate good levels of active participation with the use of mini whiteboard sets which are available in every classroom and visualisers, as well as opportunities to develop oracy skills. The language used by staff promotes a positive growth mindset and the impact of this is shown in the student survey this year with students consistently feeling there is a culture of positivity (88%). The PPG has also been used to support all students to engage with super-curricular and extracurricular opportunities. Examples of super-curricular resources which were made available to students include UniFrog and Educake, as well as the launch of Pearson Revise and our super-curricular padlets for every subject. There is a wide range of extra-curricular opportunities that are available to students and attendance is high. 74% of non-PP students attend at least one club, compared to 72% of PP students, which is a slight increase from last year and shows that all students belong to our community.

To further develop our individual support to students, with established academic support systems with subject interventions and peer mentoring, as well as study skills support being available from our Learning Mentors, through self-referral of Head of Year referral. For pastoral support, interventions are delivered with aspirational and growth mindset language and the impact of these are tracked to ensure effective interventions are in place. The student support provision continues to be reviewed termly to ensure that support is in line with students’ needs and last year’s average waiting time was 6 weeks for a student to receive an intervention. We have also continued with the annual school survey, in March 2025, and this data continues to inform our next steps with developing our student provision. This survey showed that 84% of students felt school helps to look after their emotional and mental health, which demonstrates clear and effective provision and support for students.

As restricted access to IT resources can be a barrier to students’ progress, we have continued to narrow any digital divide for students, to support learning outside of the classroom. All GCSE pupil premium students are checked to ensure they have digital access at home and school has provided a laptop if this has not been the case. As other requests have come into school we have, so far, been able to offer the loan of a laptop to support learning outside of the classroom.

We have established parent/carer surveys which are issued in conjunction with Progress Evenings which allows us to gain feedback from families, as well as offering another opportunity for families to ask questions. From these surveys, we have been able to address specific queries and we also send an email to answer frequently asked questions and share more information about our school and the opportunities available. We have identified opportunities for additional in person events for parents and carers to attend in school. Further to this, having recording engagement in the last academic year, we can intervene with families where there has been limited engagement and build a relationship with them.to support their daughter’s journey.