Year 7 Literacy and Numeracy Catch Up Premium 2019/20

In 2019/20, The Westleigh School was allocated £11789 in funding as part of the Year 7 Literacy and Numeracy Catch Up Premium. This catch-up funding provides and additional support and/or intervention necessary to help these students ‘catch up’ with their peers in relation to progress during Year 7 at the school.

 

The objectives of the funding are:

  • To close the attainment gap by providing intensive literacy and numeracy support to students entitled to catch up Premium
  • To raise self-esteem and aspirations of students entitled to Catch up Premium
  • To enhance existing provision
  • To identify concerns and target intervention and support to accelerate progress
  • To ensure that parents are informed and involved where appropriate.

At Westleigh, we believe that all students should be provided with the best chance to achieve good outcomes by the end of Year 11, therefore the intervention provided with this funding is one element of our school wide intervention provision How many students qualified for additional funding?

How did we allocate this additional funding? 

 

Allocation

Lexia Licences

£1669

Galaxy Tabs

£1750

Timetable Rockstars

£95

MathsPad

£120

Numeracy Catch Up workbooks

£100

HLTA support

£6000

Resources

£2055

 

How did we deliver intervention and what was the focus?

English Intervention:

All catch-up students were placed in English class to engage with online literacy programme ‘Lexia’. Lexia addresses the development of language skils: reading, writing and spelling. Many students enjoyed this computerized, competitive aspect of phonics instruction, completing games and progressing through levels. As part of the programme, all students received teacher-driven, personalised instruction as differentiated written tasks.

Targeted catch-up students were also extracted from 1 lesson weekly to engage in group and guided reading session with our school librarian or English TA. These lessons consisted of a shared reading experience in the library, exploring key vocabulary and comprehension skills. Students enjoyed reading aloud, challenging each other on inference questions and quizzing on the books on Accelerated Reader. Using newly purchased tablets, students were able to access short, online, graphic novels and engaged with these regularly.

Maths Intervention:

All the targeted pupils were set home learning on Timestable Rockstars and Hegarty Maths. Students enjoyed completing home learning online. During lockdown teachers continued to set home learning on Hegarty Maths so that students could consolidate their learning and use the teacher videos to support as well as their class teacher. Year 7 students accessed their home learning well during lockdown.

Mathspad is used as a teaching tool allowing teachers to access high quality lessons and resources. This is attached to our scheme of learning which is targeted to allow students who are not yet secondary ready catch up rapidly. Teachers used these resources during the lockdown period to set extra support with learning on google classrooms. This allowed lower ability students access learning if they were struggling to access some of the content on Hegarty Maths at times.

The Maths Catch up TA was appointed in January 2020. After some upskilling and purchasing the numeracy catch up workbooks a timetable was put in place for the identified catch up students. They were withdrawn from 25 minutes of one of their maths lessons. The students sat a baseline assessment at the start of the intervention which was used to identify the students learning gaps. The TA alongside the KS3 Maths coordinator planned the appropriate sessions and had started to deliver these as the close was required to close due to the corona virus pandemic.

What was the impact of this additional funding on levels in literacy and numeracy?

Of the students engaging with Lexia and group and guided reading intervention, an average reading age increase of 8 months was recorded using Accelerated Reader STAR tests from October to March.

Of the 48 students in year 7 with a maths scales score below 100, 58.3% were on or above their target to achieve a grade 4 or above in maths by March 2020

Improved standards in reading/ literacy and numeracy

  • Helped less able students make more rapid progress
  • Improved standards in English and maths lessons
  • Given students greater confidence and levels of independence
  • Improved reading ages and confidence in literacy up to data collection 2