Covid-19 Catch-Up FundinG

Catch-up Premium:

As part of the response to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the Government announced that £1 Billion of funding would be available for schools to support children and young people to catch up. This includes a one-off universal £650 million Catch-Up Premium for the 2020-2021 academic year to ensure that schools have the support they need to help all pupils make up for lost teaching time due to Covid-19.  

Further information about this grant can be found by following the link below:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-catch-up-premium

Since schools were able to open to more pupils in June 2020 and fully opened in September 2020, we have continued to assess, implement and review various measures in order to support all pupils at Sandwich Junior School to successfully transition back to full time education; taking a more holistic approach to meeting our pupils personal, pastoral and academic needs. 

• Pupils in Years 3,4 and 5 who were deemed particularly vulnerable were welcomed back to school alongside the children of key workers and Year 6 in June 2020.
• For the first few weeks back in Term 1, there was a strong emphasis placed on well-being and transitioning back to full time education, especially for those pupils in Year 3 who were completely new to the school. The curriculum was adjusted and greater focus was placed on PSHE coverage - encouraging the pupils to think about themselves and the support networks around them. The pupils also learnt about what a virus was and ways of keeping each other safe. Rings of responsibility were also utilised and linked to social distancing and hygiene.
• In week 3 of term 1, all children were assessed to enable us to baseline where all pupils were following a long period out of school, due to Lockdown, as well as identify which children were currently not on track to achieve as well as they were predicted to when school closed in March 2020.

For many pupils, we believe that time in school with high quality learning experiences will support them to make rapid progress and close the gap that developed during the period of school closure, as well as improve their lower concentration levels and overall stamina. All staff are fully aware of the importance of high quality first teaching in the classroom to effectively meet the needs of children and support them to close any gaps they may have in their learning, however, we also recognise that there are some pupils who will require additional targeted support to close any gaps, which may be delivered by 1:1 or within small groups.

Allocation:

The school have been allocated funding (£80 per pupil from Year 3-Year 6) to plan and deliver effective catch-up provision which we are accountable for, the October Census determined that we would receive a total of £17,120.00, based on a roll of 214 pupils attending SJS at the time.

We have decided to use the Coronavirus Catch-Up Premium to provide additional support to some children. Utilising staff already employed by the school to deliver targeted interventions as they know the pupils well and are best placed to assess the impact of the sessions, as well as making the decision to employ an additional Qualified Teacher, who again is well known to the school, to deliver targeted support to meet the both the academic and pastoral needs of some of our pupils.

All provision will be planned and targeted to meet the identified needs of the pupils attending.  This may include phonics, reading, writing or maths.

Impact:

In order to determine the impact of the provision put in place, informal assessments will be carried out following the individual sessions and reported to the class teacher to inform future planning; formal assessments will also be repeated throughout the year to measure progress against each pupils starting points and regular Pupil Progress Meetings will enable professional discussions to take place regarding the effectiveness of specific interventions and identify next steps moving forward.