Early Years Pupil Premium

The Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP) aims to support providers to bridge the gap between the most and least advantaged children and improve children's outcomes.

Eligibility criteria

EYPP can be claimed by an Early Year’s provider if a child is accessing a funded early education and childcare place at their setting and the child’s parent or carer receives one of the following benefits:

Income Support
Income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance
Income-related Employment and Support Allowance
Universal Credit with an annual net income not exceeding £7400
Support from NASS (National Asylum Support Service) under part 6 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999
the guarantee element of State Pension Credit
Child Tax Credit (provided the family is not also entitled to Working Tax Credit (WTC) and have an annual gross income of no more than £16,190*) 
Working Tax Credit run-on (paid for 4 weeks after a family stops qualifying for WTC)

*Current figure at time of publication

Or the child falls into one of the following groups:

they have been looked after by the local authority for at least one day
they have been adopted from care
they have left care through a special guardianship order
they are subject to a child arrangement order (previously known as a residence order)

This additional funding is paid on the first 15 universal hours for each eligible child and will show as a child weighting of 002 on your provider portal. Children will not need to access the full entitlement to be eligible for the EYPP; providers will be paid on a pro rata basis. For rates, see your termly funding letter.

Claiming EYPP

See our provider portal step-by-step guide to see how to claim for children who may be eligible for EYPP under economic circumstances.

For children who fall into one of the following:

those who have been adopted from care
those who have left care through a special guardianship order
those who are subject to a child arrangement order

Email: [email protected] to confirm that you have seen a copy of the court order as EYPP has to be added manually for these children.

How you can spend the EYPP

Although the government do not specify how this should be used, providers need to be aware of how many children they have received EYPP for and be able to clearly demonstrate to Ofsted how the money is being spent to support these children and help close the gap between the attainment of the most disadvantaged children and their peers. This could be through a variety of ways including:

pooling the EYPP to purchase shared services such as an Early Years Graduate or a Speech and Language Therapist or providing additional staff to implement strategies through organisations such as ICAN or Foundation Years
buying training from external agencies or consultants. Further information can be sought from the Workforce Development Unit (WDU) by email: [email protected] or the Early Years and Quality Improvement Team by email: [email protected]
buying services from external agencies such as music movement groups, story tellers, art and craft projects
utilising the Education Endowment Foundation’s EYPP teaching and learning toolkit which gives a variety of approaches to support children’s development
visiting outstanding provision
buying training from professional associations for example, National Day Nurseries Association, Early Years Learning Alliance, Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years, British Association of Early Childhood, ICAN
improving staff member’s qualifications or accessing specific training such as Elklan

You need to consider the following when deciding how to spend the EYPP:

what specifically will raise the quality of the Early Years education offer in my provision?
what impact will spending this money have on the individual children accessing EYPP funding?
if the child attends term time only, what provision have you put in place for the holidays? Who will be leading the spending and impact of the EYPP?
how will the EYPP:
- improve the quality of provision for early language and literacy?
- improve the quality of teaching and learning?
- contribute to practitioners CPD and how would the impact be measured?
- encourage a professional dialogue and debate to learn from other settings?
- improve the quality of the physical environment and “resources”?
- improve parent’s involvement and engagement in their child’s learning?
- effect and impact on a child’s home learning environment? Could you work in partnership with Family Learning to achieve this?
- how are you identifying children’s needs?
- how are you measuring progress and impact of the EYPP? Evidence about what works should be evident when making decisions about how to spend the EYPP
- have you considered pooling EYPP funding to purchase shared services and/or use the EYPP to buy in services?
- are you considering the evidence that shows that having a graduate within Early Years provision helps to improve the quality of practice and that graduates made the biggest difference in settings in disadvantaged areas when spending the EYPP?

The Education Endowment Foundation currently provides a teaching and learning toolkit, which is a summary of educational strategies and research to help teachers and schools decide how to use their resources to improve the attainment of disadvantaged children. This toolkit is to be extended for early years providers to assist them in identifying how best to spend the EYPP.