Over the summer the government announced £650 million will be shared across state primary and secondary schools over the 2020/21 academic year with the intent to help children catch up on learning lost during the COVID-19 school closures. This is a plan that includes all children and every child in our school will be given access to our strategy to help them catch up in English and Maths.
Schools have been given the freedom to decide how the grant will be best spent, understanding that we have the best insight of how to have the most impactful catch up strategy for our own pupils. As a school, we have decided to implement by hiring temporary staff to cover class teachers for a short time each week as they perform targeted interventions with small groups or to themselves work on focused areas of the curriculum, such as phonics and reading. All our initiatives have been directed by current research which guides us towards the most effective ways to help children learn.
In order to run this programme successfully, all teaching staff have conducted in depth gap analysis for their own class. The data they have gathered has been from a wide range of assessment sources, including NFER tests, spelling and reading ages, mock phonics screening, benchmarking and daily formative assessments throughout core lessons. These form our baseline assessments and identify the skills which will be focused on within intervention sessions.
As this is a robust and vigorous strategy, we have decided to commit a portion of our pupil premium budget to subsidise this effort. We have redirected sums which were originally allocated into areas which can not go ahead due to COVID restrictions. It is our belief that they will continue to serve the pupil premium strategy by being added towards this catch up initiative.