Pupil premium tends to be spent the way it arrives: in small amounts, spread thinly across everyone who qualifies, on the reasonable-sounding theory that a little more support, distributed fairly, will lift the pupils who need it. Sir Jonathan North Girls’ College, a secondary in Leicester and part of the Lionheart Academies Trust, has learned to do something closer to the opposite. It concentrates the money — deliberately, and at times uncomfortably narrowly — on two groups: the pupils sitting a single grade below where they could be, and the few who have drifted so far from school that the question is no longer their attainment but whether they are in any lesson at all.
The instrument in both cases is the same: online provision from Purple Ruler, a tutoring and alternative-provision specialist, run not as a bolt-on but as an extension of the college’s own teaching. Across the year the partnership delivered 555.7 hours of it. What makes the year worth studying, though, is not the hours but the discipline behind them — a method precise enough for another school to copy.
Every school is being asked the same hard question of its disadvantaged-pupil funding: can you show that each pound earned its place? In Leicester the question has acquired teeth, as changes to eligibility and a two-tier reform threaten to cut the money the college receives. Against that backdrop, its pupil-premium lead long ago gave up spreading the budget for the comfort of fairness, and started spending it where it would actually change an outcome.
The chosen pupils receive one-to-one tuition in the three subjects that decide a Progress 8 score — maths, English and science. Delivered online, it sidesteps the travel and timetabling that usually decide who can be reached, and is cheap enough to sustain across a whole year rather than a single catch-up term.
A funded place is easy to waste when no one can see what it costs. So the college puts a price on it. Families are told, in writing, exactly what the school is paying, and asked to sign up to an attendance agreement before a pupil begins — turning a quiet subsidy into a shared commitment that runs through the home as well as the classroom.
The reason the tutoring works is that it is not a second, parallel education. It is built on the college’s own schemes of work, so each one-to-one session reflects what the pupil is meeting in their ordinary lessons, reinforcing it and filling the gaps rather than teaching something new alongside it.
For a pupil-premium lead who cheerfully admits maths is not her subject, that alignment is what makes the arrangement trustworthy — and a weekly habit keeps families inside it. After every session the tutor’s feedback is forwarded to parent and pupil in the same email.
The same partnership reaches a pupil at the opposite end of the spectrum. For one high-need girl who, for safeguarding reasons, could no longer be taught on site, the danger was that her education — and the school’s relationship with her family — would simply stop. Instead, Standardised Alternative Provision through the Purple Ruler Academy kept her core subjects running and kept her connected to school. No one expected much; the engagement surprised everyone. For a pupil like this, presence is not the precondition for the result — it is the result.
For the pupils on a grade boundary, the targeting did what spreading the money never had.
And confidence and attainment began to feed each other, until the tutoring was no longer something done to the pupils but something they asked for.
Strip the story to what another school, trust or local authority could repeat tomorrow, and it comes down to six moves.