Catch Up
The Catch-Up Grant was originally introduced to offer additional support to schools for students in Year 7, who did not achieve the expected standard of 100, as a standardised score, in either English (reading) or maths. The purpose is to provide additional support to ensure that the pupils ‘catch up’ on the progress that they should have made in primary school and that they are working on a par with their peers.
Following the recent Covid 19 lockdown the Catch-Up programme was extended to offer support to all students, particularly vulnerable students to address the issues related to lost learning.
For 2020-2021 the school received a Catch-Up Premium of approximately £73,000, for students between Years 7-11.
Catch Up Premium for Literacy and Numeracy
The support will be used to raise students’ attainment in line with expectations and to ensure all students are able to work at age-related expectations and beyond. We have identified our catch-up students in 2020-2021 by assessing data from MIDYIS Tests and baseline assessments for English and/or maths.
Sir William Ramsay School spends the Catch Up Premium (which is additional to the underlying academy budget) in ways to best support raising the attainment of these students and aims to close the performance gap between them and their peers. This money is spent on additional staffing to enable us to provide these students with small group/individual support. Additional resources in English and mathematics were also provided to set extra work and to encourage students to do additional work at home. This intervention programme will be focusing on addressing the skills and knowledge gap identified in the subject baseline assessments and MIDYIS tests.
All students in Years 7-8 develop their reading skills using the Accelerated Reader Programme. Whilst Year 9 students will use the Whoos Reading package which supports both their reading fluency and extended writing skills.
Students in Years 8 and 9 who are still below the ‘School Ready Standard’ are offered further support in small group interventions, focussing on literacy, numeracy and reading. This intervention supports their progress in their approach to GCSEs. Whilst students in Key Stage 4 are offered small group intervention lessons during the school day, focusing on addressing the skills and knowledge gap as a result of the lockdown in the Spring and Summer Term of 2020 and lost learning.
In addition, this year’s funding from the Catch-Up Premium is being spent on devices to support the use the catch-up programmes and allow students to access learning software and VLE books (online texts).
We will be using part of the Catch-Up Premium for the National Tutoring Programme to offer Tuition in the form of 1:1 or small group tuition through Government approved Tutoring Providers to address student's wider curriculum.
Programme for 2020-2021
The Covid-19 Catch Up will be used to support the following strategy:
- To ensure all students make increased progress to close gaps revealed during lockdown.
- The core approaches will be catch-up tutoring with a particular focus on Y7 and Y11 with use of learning platforms to accelerate numeracy and literacy.
- To raise the attainment of all pupils to close the gap created by COVID-19 school closures.
For further details please see the Covid-19 Catch Up Premium Statement.
