Our Covid Catch-Up Recovery Curriculum

 
Our children have experienced much disruption to their learning due to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Whilst we made every effort during the national lockdowns to ensure that children’s excellent learning continued and that all children continued to make good progress at home, we know that children have returned to school with gaps in their learning. 

We continue to ensure that all children who are self-isolating, either in whole cohort groups or individually, can access the learning that would otherwise be completed in school, but we know that the disruption caused by periods of self-isolation can affect children’s social and emotional well-being as well as their academic learning.  

For more details of our Remote Learning offer, see here.

In order to support our children to catch-up with their missed learning, and to close any gaps which may have resulted from periods of remote learning, we have put in place a Covid Catch-Up Recovery curriculum. 

You will find more details of our Covid Catch-Up Premium spend here. 

We have adapted the way that we teach and the things that we focus on and in which order we focus on them, to better meet the needs of all of our children – to allow those with gaps to catch-up and to keep-up and to also allow all children to make the progress that they are capable of.

How are we supporting our children to close their gaps in learning?

September 2020 – July 2021:

We put in place an extensive programme of Covid Catch-Up last year (September 2020 to July2021), the details of which are listed below:

• On our return to school following the national lockdowns, we focussed initially on our children’s social and emotional well-being, ensuring that children to feel happy and secure again before expecting them to begin being able to plug any academic gaps in their learning. We spent time learning about what had happened, about children’s different experiences, about how children were feeling as a result and about what we needed to focus on next.  We spent quality time learning how to learn effectively and re-establishing routines.

• Next, to support children’s academic learning, we provided professional development to support our teachers with targeting curriculum planning specifically to the areas missed and most in need of catch-up. We initially focussed heavily on those gaps that children had developed in the core subject areas (Reading, Writing, Maths, GPS) so that we could quickly start to close the gaps in these subject areas to better allow our children to catch-up with gaps in the remainder of the curriculum.

• To improve the children’s early Reading and Phonics, we invested in our Read Write Inc (RWI) programme. We purchased additional training for Teachers and Teaching Assistants to ensure that any new staff were fully trained and that the programme was being taught with absolute fidelity.  We also purchased new RWI book bag books for the children to take home to read and new RWI resources for the children to use in school.  We also invested in training and staffing so that any child falling behind could receive daily 1:1 RWI tuition to enable them to catch-up quickly.  In addition, we have trained and given time to enable our RWI leader to support other RWI teachers and groups.

• We invested in Accelerated Reader for the whole school to support children’s Reading. Our children are now able to access a wider range of texts which are banded according to the children’s reading age.  All children can complete a quiz at the end of each text read, meaning that their teacher can receive instant feedback on their understanding, meaning that they can be quickly supported or challenged accordingly.

• To improve the children’s Writing, we invested in Storytelling training for all staff so that our lessons could better meet all of our children’s needs.

• To help support the children’s Mathematics catch-up, we paid for a Times Tables Rock Star subscription so that all of our children could use the programme to support their learning.

• All year groups from Reception to Year 6 benefitted from extra teachers. This meant that our teachers could target smaller groups of children to ensure that they were being taught at the correct pace and to ensure that their gaps were supported and that all children made good progress from their starting points. 

• We also invested in the National Tutoring programme which gave tuition, guided by the school, to various children.

• Our expert ICT technician spent time re-conditioning various donated devices so that we could provide access to technology for all who were learning at home.

• We funded extra interventions which focussed on other aspects of learning, such as behaviour or pupils’ social and emotional needs.
  
  
  

September 2021 – July 2022:

We are still working hard to ensure that our children’s catch-up is not halted or slowed in any way.  We continue to focus on children’s emotional and social well-being and on their progress and attainment in the core subjects, but we have also now begun looking at their gaps in the remainder of the curriculum – in the foundation subjects and in other wider curricular opportunities which have been impacted as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic:

• We hugely understand the importance of early Reading and Phonics and we appreciate that children need to acquire fundamental Reading skills in order to access the remainder of the curriculum. Therefore, we continue to offer enhanced training and professional development opportunities for our staff on Read Write Inc (RWI) to ensure that our children receive the best possible teaching.  Because we have so many staff trained to a high standard to teach RWI, our children are taught their Reading lessons in smaller groups which are tailored to their individual needs.

• All of our Phase Leaders are part of a job share. This means that each Phase Leader is able to spend a whole day every week supporting the children and staff within each year group of their phase to ensure that all of our children receive excellent teaching which is tailored to their specific needs.

• Our expert Physical Education and Health and Well-Being Coach, Mrs Bashford, does not have a class of her own this year so that she can teach PE across the school and also support staff to ensure that children’s physical and emotional health and well-being is targeted in the best ways possible.

• In addition, we have employed extra teachers to work in various year groups so that children can learn in smaller groups and have their specific needs met.

• We have employed Ms Ford to work with our Pupil Premium children so that they can receive extra support within their lessons.

• We have also ensured that Mrs Cutts can provide additional mentoring and support for our early career teaches by making her a non-class-based teacher this year.

• We have carefully mapped the key end points for each curriculum subject area, so that we are really clear on our children’s gaps across the entire curriculum. This has enabled us to adapt our initial curriculum plan for the year.

Catch-Up Long Term Plans 

We have adapted our Long Term Plans to include the key areas that we feel our children need to focus upon in order to catch up with their missed learning. 

Even though our catch-up programme is extensive, there have been, and we are sure there will continue to be, many more elements to our Covid Catch-Up which will be above and beyond the funding that we have received.  All of our staff are dedicated to achieve the very best for every child in our care and our aim, as always, is that all children will make excellent progress from their starting points during their time at Repton Manor Primary School.

Key Objectives of our Recovery Curriculum to be assessed

We have selected the key objectives that we believe to be crucial for our children's Covid Catch-up for each subject area studied.