Coronavirus (COVID-19) catch-up premium and tutoring initiative

Schools are being funded with recovery funding to help with providing supplementary teaching for those children who may have fallen behind as a result of the pandemic lockdowns. The funding is delivered in three slices across each term.

At NBJS we are spending the funding in the following way:

We have brought a classroom into use by adding a new interactive whiteboard where the intervention teaching can take place.

For Year 3 we have re-introduced phonics teaching across the whole year group, expanding to the teaching of spelling rules for those confident with their phonic knowledge. We have added extra teaching hours in the afternoon, a new set of phonics-linked reading books and a dedicated room with a large monitor has been set up. One of the year three teachers will be receiving aditional training in phonics, to work with our trained LSAs.

For Years 4 & 5 we are providing extra maths and English sessions. We have brought in a traine dteacher to work with small groups in Year 4 to run a parallel group allowing smaller group sizes across the whole year group.

For Year 6 we have set-up a daily morning or afternoon groups for maths and English for around 12 pupils allowing more focus, and reducing the size of the remaining three classes.

We use software called Target Tracker to monitor the progress children are making. These regular and frequent assessment data drops allow us to identify those children who need the extra interventions and how they are progressing on closing the gap with their expected learning journey. We can then change the children in the groups, extend the time spent in the groups or switch the strategy each term if we are not seeing the response to intervention we would expect.

These initiatives will continue until funds are exhausted.

Since Autumn term 2021 we have introduced small group tutoring using the latest DfE funding award. We will be operating small, focused groups which will be drawn from across a year group. Mrs Bullen, one of the current year 3 team, will initially be working with Year 4 pupils. We will be running the sessions to spend a little longer to ensure concepts are embedded. The group will have the same input on Monday, then on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday will work in parallel with their cohort, but in a smaller group allowing more time to ensure learning has been understood. These sessions will run at the same time of day - children will then still be able to follow the whole curriculum each day. After a fixed period of time the progress of the children will be evaluated.

We are also using NFER summative testing at the end of Autumn and mid-Summer terms to allow standardised scoring and evaluation of on-going intervention needs.