Following the lockdown on March 28th due to COVID 19 the children of Buckden CE primary Academy had to adapt as learners and rely on home schooling, remote teacher support and a reduced amount of face to face teaching from their class teacher. This inevitably meant that many children have gaps in their knowledge from the previous year group when they returned in September. 

At Buckden, we have constructed a ‘catch-up’ plan to ensure children catch up on any lost learning time and potential gaps in knowledge. This plan will focus on quality first teaching, empowering our team of teachers by providing high quality training, specific year group ‘gap’ filling, classroom intervention and small group targeted support with the child’s health and well-being at the centre of all we do. 

The government has announced £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 should use this funding for specific activities to support their pupils to catch up for lost teaching over the previous months and have the flexibility to spend their funding in the best way for their children and circumstances.

Buckden CE Primary Academy has been allocated £26,400 additional ‘catch-up’ funding to support interventions designed to close gaps in attainment for this academic year.

How will spending decisions about interventions be made?

Since July, leaders in school have been following best practice guidance documents and approaches published by the DfE (Department for Education) and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) to ensure the additional funding is directed in the most effective way (see Appendix 1). Approaches taken by the school will be driven by our detailed knowledge of children’s current attainment and will draw upon approaches that are evidence-based that are proven to have a positive impact on closing gaps.

Buckden CE Academy takes a ‘tiered approach’ to closing gaps and raising attainment (see Appendix 2). In addition to high-quality teaching and learning interventions within the school day, Buckden CE primary Academy have extended the school day for year 5 & 6 by 30 minutes (2.5 hours a week, additional 97.5 hours a year), employed 2 additional teaching assistants. Currently looking to employ 4 early years support workers, and 4 catch up support workers. Invested in formalised assessment testing to identify gaps, standardised scores nationally and track progress.

During the Autumn term, Governors in school scrutinised the ‘catch-up’ premium strategy to ensure all strategies chosen will have a positive impact on children’s attainment. The catch-up programme will link closely to the school improvement plans and Pupil Premium Strategy. Leaders must be able to account for how money is being used to achieve the goal of ‘catch-up’ Lesson plans will evaluate learning and identify gaps; assessment will be used regularly to assess progress against targets.

Who will benefit from the funding?

During Autumn 2020, all children across the school have undertaken high-quality assessments in reading, writing, phonics / spelling and maths. Through careful analysis of this assessment data, teachers have identified groups of children that will benefit from ‘catch-up’ support or other interventions to enable them to close gaps in understanding and attainment. All pupils will benefit from this funding as we need to ensure that all pupils are achieving their full potential given that they all experienced ‘lockdown’.  Some work with some pupils with be specific targeted support and with others it will be indirect.

Detailed plans listed below with costings and long term aims.

Funding allocated to Teaching:                  £11,580

Funding allocated to Academic Support:      £53,326

Wider strategies                                     £1,600

Total amount spent:                                £66,506        

The catch up premium allocated by the government to the school is £26,400.  The school funding the additional £40,106 from the school budget to meet the needs of the pupils

Please see our full comprehensive detailed plan below for explanation of the catch up programme along with our school EEF tiered model.