Covid Catch Up

The Government has announced that £1 billion of funding has been earmarked for schools 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 due to Covid- 19. Kirby Muxloe has received an allocation of £32,000.

At KMPS, we will utilise the catch up premium funding to aid recovery from the recent disruption to learning. Our key areas of focus are:

1. Enabling rapid replacement of missed phonics learning time and ensuring all staff have the training and resources they need
2. Providing resources to further support remote and home learning in mathematics
3. Providing additional time resource to differentiate learning for those most affected by learning disruption
4. Adapt the school spaces to enable this work to take place within a ‘bubble’ environment

Expenditure for 2020-21

The majority of the allocation was spent in the 2020-21 academic year on the following:

• Converting part of our swimming pool area in order to make it habitable as a part-time teaching space. This enabled us to teach groups from different bubbles in the same space whilst maintaining appropriate social distance. This primarily supported Key Stage 2 maths teaching, but was also used for literacy work.
• More extensive investment in high quality phonics training and an annual subscription to online training and resources that were invaluable during lockdowns for supporting the continuance of phonics teaching remotely.
• Additional online resources for maths and other subjects to enable children to receive more tailored learning resources for homework or remote learning exercises.
• The bulk of this funding was spent on additional hours and time of teaching and support staff. This was used to enable smaller group teaching of maths in Key Stage 2, additional phonics sessions in Key Stage 1 and general additional support across the school in order to support the filling of learning gaps as identified during assessments.

Planned Expenditure for 2021-22

With residual funds of approximately £4,000, we have had to scale back much of the activity from 2020-21. Plans for this year’s spend include:

• Focused before, during and after school learning activities for those children with the most learning gaps to address in years 2 and 3.
• Continuance of phonics training and online resources to support the phonics catch up work.