What is the Service Pupil Premium?

The Department for Education introduced the Service Pupil Premium (SPP) in April 2011 in recognition of the specific challenges children from service families face and as part of the commitment to delivering the armed forces covenant.

State schools, academies and free schools in England, which have children of service families in school years Reception to Year 11, can receive the SPP funding. It is designed to assist the school in providing the additional support that these children may need and is currently worth £300 per service child who meets the eligibility criteria.

Eligibility criteria

Pupils attract the SPP if they meet the following criteria:

• one of their parents is serving in the regular armed forces
• they have been registered as a ‘service child’ in the school census at any point since 2011
• one of their parents died whilst serving in the armed forces and the pupil receives a pension under the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme or the War Pensions Scheme
• pupils with a parent who is on full commitment as part of the full time reserve service are classed as service children

The purpose of the Service Pupil Premium

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.

Mobility is when a service family is posted from one location to another, including overseas and within the UK.

Deployment is when a service person is serving away from home for a period of time. This could be a 6 to 9 month tour of duty, a training course or an exercise which could last for a few weeks.

How Service Pupil Premium differs from the Pupil Premium

The SPP is there for schools to provide mainly pastoral support for service children, whereas the Pupil Premium was introduced to raise attainment and accelerate progress within disadvantaged groups.

At Ancaster we do not combine SPP with the main Pupil Premium funding and the spending of each premium is accounted for separately.

What could the Service Pupil Premium be used for?

In order to support the pastoral needs of service children, schools have flexibility over how they use the SPP, as they are best placed to understand and respond to the specific needs of those pupils for whom the funding has been allocated. The funding could be spent on providing a variety of means of support including counselling provision, nurture groups.

Schools might also consider how to improve the level of and means of communication between the child and their deployed parents.  In addition, staff hours may be required to support the needs of service children when they join a new school as a result of a posting or when a parent is deployed and these hours could be funded by the Service Pupil Premium.

Whilst schools will not use the money to subsidise school trips to support curriculum based learning, schools may choose to fund specific school trips just for service children, to help them enjoy their time at school and build a sense of a wider community and understanding of the role their service parent plays (e.g. with military specific trips) to help them cope with the potential strains of service life.

In Ancaster, some of the ways we have used the premium are for enrichment art projects in which the children have worked to express themselves in a variety of different ways, offered external counselling support for children coping with a parent on a long term deployment and utilised our pastoral teaching assistant to support forces pupils who have needed emotional support at any given time.

If your child is eligible and you feel there is a specific resource which may help your child in either understanding or coping with the service life-please speak with us so we can arrange a meeting to discuss.