Covid-19 Catch up Premium
The majority of the catch up premium is going to be spent on tuition for small groups of children in Years 1-4 and one to one tuition for children with EHCPs as children had returned to school with gaps in their learning. Initially, this was going to be on a Teach First mentor who would work in school all year full time working across different year groups. The school applied for this both in July 2020 for the September start and in November 2020 for the January 2021 start. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful in being placed with a mentor and have identified an alternative, the National Tutoring Programme which means the use one of the Governments registered tutoring companies to hire four tutors for 10 weeks to work with the children identified above.
Within the mainstream, these tutors will work with groups of 3 children at a time throughout the week with each child accessing a maximum of 15 hours tutoring over the 10 week period. For children with EHCPs, the tutor will work with each child individually, again for a maximum of 15 hours. These tutoring sessions, both in groups and one to one, will be planned by the teachers to ensure continuity. They will be followed with the tutors providing the teachers with detailed assessment information based on the interventions. These interventions should have run from the second week of the Spring 1 term until Easter and would focus on closing gaps in learning due to the first National lockdown. Due to the present National lockdown this has now been postponed but will up as soon as children return to school and run this for the full 10 weeks.
Additionally, the catch up funding (£999) has been used to purchase a year’s online library subscription to our chosen book company – BigCats. By purchasing this, any child who is isolating at home has access all year to the exact books they would be reading in class. This system has now also been used by teachers within the mainstream to set guided reading tasks and to continue with supporting reading during this time as they can allocate children their correct reading books.
The National Tutoring Programme for the Early Years has provided the opportunity for a member of the school staff to be trained on running effective language and vocabulary development interventions in the Early Years. This programme provides online training and has resources sent to the school to run interventions. A member of staff will be released for around 10 hours to complete the training costing £100 to cover. This training is due to commence online in February which would mean we are ready to begin the intervention upon the children’s return.