Rationale

In June 2020 the government announced £1 billion of funding to support children and young people to catch up on missed learning caused by coronavirus (COVID19). This is especially important for the most vulnerable pupils and pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds who we know have been most affected.  (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-catch-up-premium)  

 

The money for the catch up premium is designed to ensure that schools have the support they need for all pupils make up for lost teaching time, and the money for the national tutoring school is designed to provide additional, targeted support for those children and young people who need the most help.

 

There are two broad aims for “catch up” at St Thomas:

• The mental health needs of pupils are well met and supported by the school.

• Progress outcomes; children should have maintained or made better progress since the period of lockdown started taking into account individual circumstances where necessary.

 

At St Thomas, following the advice from the EEF the Covid-19 ‘Catch up’ money will be used in order to provide:

• curriculum resources and materials that support mental health and well-being of pupils- though sport, gardening and smaller group time with their teacher

• to enable staff to identify gaps in learning and to plan to bridge those gaps

• to fund three different tutoring programs offering ‘in-house’ and ‘online’ tuition.

• to fund the participation in the DfE’s Nuffield Early Language Intervention in Foundation Stage. This is an evidence based 20 week oral language intervention programme for children in their first year of primary school who may need additional support in developing their oral language skills.

 

Catch up at St Thomas CE (VC) Primary is: (for all children)

 

• Time spent on mental health, wellbeing and social skills development. This will be at the core of all catch up work as many children will have not been in formal school setting for a number of months. We will use GROW and Project Sport as well as our own themed PSHCE curriculum to support this.

• Working through well sequenced, purposeful planning. For example, teachers have adapted planning in order to focus on missed objectives and to consolidate the basics.

• Focus on consolidation of basic skills. Core skills include: handwriting, spelling of high frequency words, basic sentence punctuation, times tables recall, basic addition & subtraction fact recall and reading skills relevant to age.

• Particular focus on early reading and phonics. This is always a focus in the school and will continue to be so in order to develop children’s reading ability and vocabulary. Year 2 will continue with daily phonics lessons to ensure all children are confident with their phonic sounds and Year 3 will ensure all missed phonics teaching is covered

• Assessment of learning and of basic skills to identify major gaps. Teachers will work to identify gaps in learning and adapt teaching accordingly.

 

 (For some children)

• Additional support and focus on basic core skills. Supported by tutoring, utilising catch up premium – dependent on need as identified through ongoing assessment.

• Additional time to practice basic skills. This again will be dependent on need of children in order to re-establish good progress in the essentials (phonics and reading, increasing vocabulary, writing and mathematics).

• Additional targeted language support for Foundation children. Teachers will work to identify children who will benefit from small group and one-to-one language support. This will be delivered over a 20 week period as part of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention.