The government has awarded all schools with a grant to spend on catch-up as a result of COVID-19. This is called the COVID catch-up premium grant and it is up to schools to decide how they spend it. 

At Holy Family, we were granted £15,120 for the academic year 2020-21.

We spent this on employing an extra teacher in Terms 3 and 4 to address gaps in KS2 (£9,954), particularly in writing which was an area adversely affected by the partial closures. We also employed an extra teaching assistant who ran a maths intervention two days a week across the school at a cost of £3,394. Alongside this, we purchased licences for a programme called Learning by Questions (LbQ) at a cost of £1250.

LbQ builds their pedagogy, technology & teaching & learning resources using evidence from schools, teachers, pupils, leading research, independent randomised controlled trials & recognised bodies such as The Institute for Effective Education & The Education Endowment Foundation.

They focus on what works & does not work at a practical level in classrooms using lesson-by-lesson feedback from teachers & data from millions of pupil answers to high-quality questions. This direct reading from classrooms taken together with the research provides a rich picture of the developing evidence base. This is used by LbQ to improve the attainment & wider outcomes of children & young people, as well as eliminating unnecessary burdens on teachers.