Impact of Catch Up Spending 2020/2021
The Academy has continued to maintain a strong focus on the development of literacy, reading and numeracy given their central importance to a student’s ability to access all areas of the school curriculum. Despite the turbulent nature of the academic year due to the pandemic, interventions continued to run remotely throughout the school closures and the funding was used in line with the above proposed spending. All interventions have also been closely aligned to the overall Academy’s COVID 19 recovery plan and strategic priorities.
Outcomes show evidence of impact across all academic strategies. For example, in Year 7 reading intervention, the overall improvement in reading ages was an increase of 8 months, considering the disruption to school attendance this is a notable improvement for our most reluctant readers. Furthermore, of these students, a number improved their reading age by over a year, further reducing the gap with their peers. Moreover, students with an Education, Health and Care Plan improved their reading ages by one year during the four-month intervention period. The focus on further developing students’ literacy remains a school priority.
Maths intervention was founded on consolidating knowledge of the key threshold concepts, to support students in knowing more and remembering more. Outcomes show that students demonstrated improvement in the key topics covered, including ‘Binomial Expansion’, ‘Linear Factorisation’ and ‘Pythagoras’ Theorem’.
At Key Stage Four, extensive intervention across a range of subjects, resulted in an improvement in Attainment 8 scores from 49 in 2019/2020 to 52.57 in the 2020/2021 Teacher Assessed Grades.
Additionally, as a result of the high quality, bespoke support given to students during the school closure period, for example rewards for participation and home learning, engagement in remote learning remained high throughout the lockdown periods.
Full details can be found below:
Year-7-Catch-up-funding 2019-2020