Background

Children and young people across the country have experienced unprecedented disruption to their education as a result of coronavirus (COVID-19). Those from the most vulnerable and disadvantaged backgrounds will be among those hardest hit. The aggregate impact of lost time in education may be substantial, and the scale of our response must match the scale of the challenge. Schools’ allocations will be calculated on a per-pupil basis, providing each mainstream primary school with a total of £80 for each pupil from reception through to Year 6. As the catch-up premium has been designed to mitigate the effects of the unique disruption caused by a coronavirus (COVID-19), the grant will only be available for 2020 to 2021 academic year. It will not be added to schools’ baselines in calculating future years’ funding allocations.

Allocated funds for the academic year 2020-2021

Elham Primary School has an allocation of £10643 for this academic year.  This is based on 132 children on roll.  This equates to £80 per child.

Use of the funds

Due to each class remaining as a unique 'bubble' to maintain social distancing to prevent the spread of the virus, teaching assistant hours have been increased to ensure that each class has the support the children need in each of the classes across the school.

For Lockdown 3 (January 2021) we wanted to increase our remote learning offer and decided to set up Gsuite for Education.  The training that the staff needed was funded by the premium.

To ensure that the remote learning offer during Lockdown 3 was the best it could be, the school invested in hardware to support smooth teaching.  This included dual screens for staff to use at home and in school, wireless mice, cables to enable computers to run smoothly during live teaching.

We have subscribed to apps to support the children's learning at home and in school.  The cost of these subscriptions has been taken out of the premium. 

To ensure all children had access to laptops, we purchased new laptops and reconditioned laptops that were kindly donated to the school.

Purchase an annual subscription to a speech and language program to use to assess speaking and listening. Time will be given for the screenings to take place using existing adults.

New reading books will be purchased to support reading across the school.