Covid-19

Catch Up Premium at Ashlands

In the academic year 2021/2022 Ashlands Primary School has been allocated a grant of £4,785 with £7,200 being carried forward to the academic year 2022 / 2023. In academic year 2022 / 2023 we received a further £9970. We anticipate that £0 will be carried forward into the academic year 2023 / 2024.

After the return to school of all children in September 2020, we waited for children to adjust to the changes following Lockdown. This is partly to allow them to become familiar with their new class teacher and for observations to be made about where they are in their learning, retention of knowledge and how any additional funded catch up would most benefit them. We are mindful that all children will need to develop their learning stamina and so we will avoid adding to the learning day length particularly for our younger children.

Teachers have produced a simple grid to identify children in their class who would benefit from Catch up work and the nature of the additional work that would help them most.

Through these grids it became clear that our younger children would get most benefit from speech and language support to extend and develop their vocabulary, understanding and social skills. For our older children Maths is an identified area of need – there are gaps in children’s knowledge and recall.

We will run speech and language groups to help with this identified gap for our younger children.

We have used National tutoring from Fisher Family Trust for Reading and maths tutoring from White Rose Maths. These are through the National scheme where 75% of the cost is paid from central government with school paying just 25%.

Writing has remained an issue for our children over an extended period of time and we feel that this is a great opportunity to address this. We are looking at using experienced and knowledgeable teachers to work with small groups of children from upper key stage 2 to give confidence and enthusiasm to all our writers. We are also interested in the work from No More Marking regarding their observation that one of the most important aspects of writing is sentence structure. They are producing a trial website to support upper key stage 2 children in revisiting the aspects of writing sentences properly, we are seeking to be part of their trial of this new website to improve the children’s ability to write coherently and well.

Children’s Mental Health and Wellbeing has also been highlighted Nationally. We are in the process of putting a Place 2 Be Mental Health Practitioner into school for 2 days a week. Thie person will be able to work with our children and support them in a timely manner when other outside agencies have long waiting lists.