Dothill Primary School: Pupil Premium Grant Allocation
Purpose of the Pupil Premium Grant
The pupil premium grant is additional funding provided by the government to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged pupils in state-funded schools in England.
The grant also provides support for children and young people with parents in the regular armed forces, referred to as service pupil premium (SPP). Pupils that the SPP intends to support are not necessarily from financially disadvantaged backgrounds.
As a school, we ensure we use the wealth of evidence of ‘what works’, evaluated by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), to use this funding effectively.
A copy of the Pupil Premium Policy for our school can be found in this folder.
Funding criteria
Pupil premium funding is allocated to eligible schools based on the following criteria:
- pupils who are recorded as eligible for free school meals, or have been recorded as eligible in the past 6 years (referred to as Ever 6 FSM) (the FSM criteria changed from September 2026 - please see update below)
- children previously looked after by a local authority or other state care, including children adopted from state care or equivalent from outside England and Wales
Pupil premium is not a personal budget for individual pupils, and schools do not have to spend pupil premium so that it solely benefits pupils who meet the funding criteria. It can be used in the following ways:
- to support other pupils with identified needs, such as those who have or have had a social worker, or who act as a carer
- for whole class interventions which will also benefit non-disadvantaged pupils
Funding Rates for the 2026/27 financial year
Current funding levels are £1550 for Ever 6 FSM children, £2690 for children in care/post care, and £360 for service children.
Schools are free to spend the Pupil Premium as they see fit. However, all schools will be held accountable for how they have used the additional funding to support eligible pupils.
The Pupil Premium Strategy is a document which gives a rationale for our spending so that we ensure we are using the money in a way that makes a difference to our pupils. At Dothill, staff and Governors work in partnership to carefully plan how we allocate funding according to the needs of our children to help them to achieve.
Please look at the document below to see how Dothill is using the Pupil Premium Grant to support learners.
Pupil Premium Strategy Statement 2024-2027 - as of December 2025
Implications of the free school meals expansion on pupil premium from September 2026
From the start of the 2026 to 2027 academic year, the Department for Education (DfE) is delivering an expansion to FSM eligibility to include all pupils from households in receipt of Universal Credit. There will then be 2 categories of FSM:
- Targeted FSM, which continues to be based on the existing £7,400 income threshold
- Expanded FSM, which will apply to meals only, covering pupils who do not qualify for Targeted FSM, but who are in households in receipt of Universal Credit
Following the expansion of FSM, only pupils eligible for Targeted FSM will be part of the Ever 6 FSM cohort. This means that pupils who become eligible for FSM for the first time through the new Expanded FSM category will not attract pupil premium funding.
Pupils who were eligible for FSM before the expansion will continue to be part of the Ever 6 FSM cohort after the expansion. That includes any pupil whose household income increases after the expansion, such that they either lose FSM eligibility altogether or become eligible for FSM through Expanded FSM. Such pupils will remain part of the Ever 6 FSM cohort for 6 years.