Pupil Premium and reading fluency: where is the evidence of impact?

£3 billion. That is what Pupil Premium funding will exceed in 2025-26, with an additional £5bn flowing through deprivation factors in the National Funding Formula.

The DfE's white paper makes the government's reading priority unmistakable. A statutory Year 8 fluency test. A National Year of Reading. The 90% phonics screening target. Reading Ambition for All CPD doubling. The expectation is clear: this money should translate into measurable reading improvement for disadvantaged children.

The metric most schools are not tracking

I want to name this carefully because I know how hard schools are working with the resources they have. Most schools evidence their Pupil Premium reading spend with comprehension scores. Which is a bit like evidencing your fitness programme with a photograph. It shows you the end point but tells you nothing about the journey.

And this is not because leaders do not know better. It is because the system has never given most schools a clear, practical way to track fluency. The training has not been there. The affordable tools have not been there. Schools have done the best they could with what they had.

Why fluency is the evidence that matters

As I explored in the second post in this series, the research connecting fluency to comprehension is substantial. Accuracy and prosody are among the strongest predictors of reading comprehension. Ofsted's reports find that schools overuse comprehension questions at the expense of fluency instruction. The DfE Reading Framework defines fluency as accuracy, automaticity and prosody: all three, not just the first.

FFT's data makes this even more concrete for disadvantaged children specifically. Their Reading Assessment Programme shows a persistent gap of 10 to 15 words correct per minute between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. Their decomposition analysis found that roughly half of the gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged children's KS2 reading comprehension scores is explained by lower fluency. Half. If you could improve the fluency of your Pupil Premium children, you could close half the comprehension gap.

If your PP children cannot read fluently, comprehension interventions are building on sand. The metric you should be tracking is not just "can they comprehend?" It is "can they read fluently enough to comprehend?"

What evidence of impact actually looks like

The question every headteacher needs to be ready for is straightforward: what is your evidence of impact? Not what you spent. What it did.

Proper evidence looks like this. Termly fluency assessment for every PP child. Group-level tracking that shows the gap between PP and non-PP fluency scores over time. A clear connection between your intervention strategy and the fluency data. Not "we ran a reading intervention three times a week." But "our PP children's fluency scores improved by X words per minute over Y terms, and here is the prosody data to match."

The money is significant. The accountability is increasing. And the metric that matters most is the one most schools are not yet tracking.

That is not your fault. But it is your opportunity.

Next in this series: a step-by-step guide to building a Pupil Premium fluency evidence trail.

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References

• Department for Education (2026). Every Child Achieving and Thriving. gov.uk
• Department for Education (2023). The Reading Framework. gov.uk
• FFT Education Datalab (2024). Measuring reading fluency during primary education. ffteducationdatalab.org.uk
• Ofsted (2024). Telling the Story: The English Education Subject Report. gov.uk

In this series

1. What the DfE white paper means for reading fluency in primary schools
2. Why reading fluency matters: the research behind the Year 8 test
3. How to prepare for the Year 8 reading fluency test: five steps for primary schools
4. Pupil Premium and reading fluency: where is the evidence of impact? (this post)
5. How to build a Pupil Premium reading fluency evidence trail that holds up (next week)