“Our vision for our pupil premium spending is to bring the best and most exciting experiences to children to really engage them in the curriculum.”

“We want to celebrate and boost children’s confidence, helping them to become more articulate and skilled with the way they use language.”

Many schools use pupil premium funding to support their Artis provision. We spoke to Sarah Murray, Headteacher at Haveley Hey Primary School, to better understand why they chose to work with Artis and how this has impacted on the outcomes they were hoping to achieve.

Sarah explained that pupil premium funding has to impact directly on outcomes, so Haveley Hey have a multi layered approach. They focus much of their funding on CPD and improving the quality of teaching, but also have a more general approach aimed around giving children quality experiences.

“If your staff don’t teach in an interactive and engaging way, then your teaching isn’t going to be great. The CPD we receive from working with Artis makes our teaching more engaging, imaginative and truly special. In our community we have wonderful children but they often don’t know how to take responsibility for themselves, or how to conform to a school setting. We need our staff to be on the ball, providing exciting and hugely engaging sessions and Artis helps us to do something different in with our teaching.”

In addition to providing CPD, Sarah told us about how the work Artis has done has brought huge benefits directly to the children, mainly around confidence. This increased confidence allows the children to be more creative, more expressive and more engaged in their learning.

“If someone challenged our school and said ‘you’re spending your funding on Artis, how do you justify the impact it is having?’ I would tell them to come and see a session. If you see it happening you will understand it.”

We asked Sarah to explain how Haveley Hey communicates the impact that Artis has on individual children. She explained that generating case studies is the key to showing definite proof that a certain child has improved their attendance, or increased their engagement in the classroom. Sarah told us about a year 6 child who joined the school part way through the year with really poor attendance and low self-esteem. “He loved the Artis sessions, began attending the after school club and really came out of his shell. He also achieved his level 4s. Yes, this impact is also from his teacher, but part of it is definitely because he loved the Artis sessions and began to really look forward to learning”.

Sarah finished by saying that “if other schools have similar barriers to learning as us, then engaging Artis with your pupil premium funding is a no brainer. We do fund some things that are difficult to directly link to academic outcomes, but we believe these things make children engaged, happy, confident and wanting to learn. If you’re creating that feeling in children, then what you do in the classroom will work and you will see results.”