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.

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 53 pence per hour for three and four year old children whose parents are in receipt of certain benefits or who have been in care or adopted from care. 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 to us.

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 for example 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. This funding will help to keep the third member of staff we currently employ in Nursery (regulations state that staff should be in the ratio of 1 adult to 13 children, we have 1 adult to 8.6 children).

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.

New parents are given a Parents Declaration form to complete on their child’s entry to nursery. Section 5 relates to Early Years Pupil Premium and parents are asked to complete this section if they believe their child may qualify for EYPP.