Little Darwins Nursery

Early Years Pupil Premium

Since April 2015, nurseries, schools, childminders and other childcare providers have been able to claim extra funding through the Early Years Pupil Premium to support children’s development, learning and care. Here we explain what the Early Years Pupil Premium is, explain who is eligible for this funding and importantly, to ask you to fill out the forms so that we as a provider can claim the extra funding.

National data and research tells that children eligible for free school meals tend to do less well, for example in 2014 45% of children eligible for free school meals achieved the expected level at the end of the early years foundation stage compared with 64% of other children. The Early Years Pupil Premium will provide us with extra funding to close this gap.

The Early Years Pupil Premium provides an extra 62 pence per hour for three and four year old children whose parents are in receipt of certain benefits or who were formally in local authority care but who left care because they were adopted or were subject to a special guardianship or child arrangements order. This means an extra £302 a year for each child taking up the full 570 hours funded entitlement to early education. This additional money could make a significant difference.

We can use the extra funding in any way we choose to improve the quality of the early years education that we provide for your child. This could include more resources, additional training for our staff on early language, investing in partnership working with our colleagues in the area to further our expertise or supporting our staff in working on specialised areas such as speech and language.

It is well documented that high quality early education can influence how well a child does at both primary and secondary school so we do want to make the most of this additional funding. You may be aware if you have older children that a pupil premium has been available for school age children and it has proved to have given a real boost to the children receiving the funding. We want to do the same for our early years children entitled to this funding.

If you think you may be entitled to this please complete the information on your Free Early Education Entitlement Parent Declaration form each term.  If you have any questions please feel free to speak to Lucy, Steph or Lorraine and rest assured of complete confidentiality.