COVID Catch-Up Premium

The government provided additional funding for schools for the academic year 2020-2021 to help address pupils’ lost teaching time. Schools were expected to use this funding for specific activities to support pupils in line with curriculum expectations for the next academic year.

As a school, we received £50,000 for the 2020-21 academic year.

Governors agreed to use this funding to support additional staffing for the academic year including

• Additional teacher for the mornings in Y6 to enable smaller groupings and more focussed teaching, matched to pupil needs in maths and English, to help them become ‘secondary-ready’;
• Additional teaching assistant support to deliver evidence-based intervention programmes and to increase the capacity for paired reading delivered in-house (due to restrictions on use of volunteers due to Covid);
• Increase in ELSA hours to provide greater capacity for targeted pastoral support in the transition back to school.

Plans were adjusted through the year according to the needs of pupils, making use of on-going teacher assessments. This enabled targeted catch-up to support children in being ‘Ready to Progress’ in July 2021 to the next year group curriculum. This was particularly important following the lockdown/partial school closure in the Spring term 2021 where around 60% of our pupils accessed some face-to-face provision in small groups as part of our Key Worker/Vulnerable Pupil provision with the other 40% provided with remote learning.