• Back to previous menu
• 18 July 2014
• • Record levels of financial support for students coming to Sussex
  • Physicists celebrate second anniversary of discovery of the Higgs boson
  • Sussex and local schools launch new research network
  • Issues of social and educational disadvantage addressed by key research event at Sussex
  • Sussex historian digs up the facts for major BBC radio series on botany
  • Sussex researchers talk about talking to the animals for BBC TV documentary
  • Conference to challenge thinking about the role of the state in innovation
  • Sussex psychologist receives lifetime achievement award
  • Silverstone test for student engineers’ self-built racing car
  • Our university is great for the city

Issues of social and educational disadvantage addressed by key research event at Sussex

The University's Centre for Teaching and Learning Research (CTLR) hosted an event on campus on Monday (14 July) that brought together more than 50 educational practitioners to discuss developing evidence-based approaches to the Pupil Premium, a funding initiative introduced nationally to improve educational outcomes for young people from the least socially advantaged backgrounds.

There was a large turn-out for the CTLR-hosted Pupil Premium event at Sussex

The keynote speakers were

• Professor Alan Dyson, Co-Director of the Centre for Equity in Education at the University of Manchester and co-author of the Department for Education evaluation report on the Pupil Premium,
• and Professor Judy Sebba, Director of the Rees Centre for Research in Fostering and Education at the University of Oxford.

They provided an engaging overview of key issues to inform decision-making around Pupil Premium funding from a national perspective.

Presentations were also delivered by CTLR researchers covering issues such as:

• school exclusion
• resilience
• literacy
• community engagement
• and the deployment of teaching assistants to support learning.

The event organiser, Senior Lecturer in Education, Dr Louise Gazeley, said: “We were really delighted to be able to bring practitioners and researchers together to reflect on what the key considerations need to be when making decisions about how to utilise Pupil Premium funding.

"The excellent response we had from staff in primary and secondary schools and local authorities shows just how important this issue is.”