Catch-up Funding 2020-21
The government has announced a catch-up premium, equivalent to £80 per pupil, for 2020 to 2021 academic year to ensure that schools have the support they need to help all pupils make up for lost teaching time.
The guidance on the use of funding states that "although all children have had their education disrupted by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, it is likely that disadvantaged and vulnerable groups will have been hardest hit".
Each school is responsible for allocating this money in order to meet specific, identified areas for focus - such as those relating to learning, assessment, intervention strategies and pastoral needs, in order to help reduce the impact of Covid-19 on children's learning.
As such, every school leadership team are creating a plan to show how this funding is being spent, the reasons for these decisions and the intended impact. The plan for Robin Hood Primary School can be found below.
Children and young people across the country have experienced unprecedented disruption to their education as a result of Covid-19.
The government has announced a national programme of £1 billion of funding to support children and young people to catch up. This includes a one-off universal £650 million catch-up premium for the 2020 to 2021 academic year to ensure that schools have the support they need to help all pupils make up for lost teaching time.
Schools’ allocations are calculated on a per pupil basis: £80 for each pupil from Reception (Foundation 2) to Year 6. As the catch-up premium has been designed to mitigate the effects of the disruption caused by Covid-19, the grant is available for the 2020 to 2021 academic year only; there are currently no plans to include in schools’ funding allocations in future years. The funding is provided in three instalments and draws upon the guidance outlined in the Educational Endowment Fund’s Covid-19 Support for Schools guide, as advocated by the DfE.
Schools should use this funding for specific activities to support their pupils to catch up for lost teaching over the previous months; they have the flexibility to spend their funding in the best way for their cohort and circumstances. This document outlines the support in place at Robin Hood Primary to make best use of the funding.
Provision is planned fairly to target as many children as possible, with particular attention to those that may have been disadvantaged most by school closure.
READING: Although we anticipate issues, Reading is likely to have been supported well by parents over lockdown. However, this has potentially led to a widened gap between the more advantaged/supported and the more disadvantaged/less supported.
- significant gaps in phonics knowledge
- attitudes to reading may have deteriorated
- weaker reading stamina
- restricted fluency
- limited exposure to a full range of texts
- weaker reading comprehension skills, particularly inference
WRITING: It was challenging to provide meaningful and accessible Writing activities that could be supported by parents at home. As a result, there are large gaps. Despite this, teachers report a very positive attitude to writing from the majority of children.
- reluctance to write
- significant gaps in phonics knowledge / weaker spelling
- less writing stamina
- weaker handwriting
- significantly more basic errors, such as capital letters and full stops
- less secure sentence structure
MATHS: There was a good deal of Maths provided for home learning. However, traditionally, this is a subject with which it can be hard to engage parents and therefore it may not have seen supported as well as Reading. As a result, there are large gaps for some children.
- the core recall skills, that would have been practised regularly, are not sharp. These include times tables and addition/subtraction
- lessons to recap previous learning are needed in the teaching sequence, resulting in more time than usual needed to cover a particular area.
- baseline tests in Term 1 show roughly half or less of each cohort are at age-related
- there are large parts of the maths curriculum (those areas that are identified on the long-term plan that haven't been accessed. A plan is in place to address this before they come up again.
SCIENCE: Children missed two half-terms of science. There's a need to catch-up so that misconceptions don't arise and new knowledge isn't being built on shaky foundations. We can catch up on this by re-thinking / replacing some aspects of our long-term plans eg replacing a unit on working scientifically (something which is returned to regularly).
WIDER CURRICULUM: A disrupted end to the first year of our new curriculum has meant that teachers haven't had the opportunity to get to grips fully with the new curriculum, including end of year assessments. To address this, we had some CPD during lockdown to keep profile of curriculum planning and structure fresh in teachers' minds, and in 2020- 21, we have allocated time for regular CPD each half-term to support teachers' planning and delivery of topic and science units.
Some missed learning from summer term units for children and missed opportunity to work on children's retention of knowledge from units taught earlier in the year. To address this, we are doing some CPD on memory and knowledge retention, and we’ll monitor children's knowledge to check how well this is working.
Please click below to download a copy of our catch up strategy
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| Catch-up Strategy 2020-2021.pdf | Download |
