Your child's teacher has used the first few weeks of the autumn term to find out what your child knows and remembers in the core areas of the National Curriculum, reading, writing and maths, and to establish any gaps in learning they might have due to the school closure in the summer term.
This is what our assessment information tells us:
- In Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 too few pupils are working at the expected stage in phonics.
- In Year 2 around 30% of pupils need to catch-up in reading, writing and mathematics.
- In Year 3 around 40% of pupils need to catch up in reading, writing and mathematics.
- In Years 4, 5 and 6, too few pupils are on track to meet expected standards in writing.
- Progress has slowed for some pupils with high starting points (baseline*) in all year groups.
*Baseline is taken from end of Reception and end of key stage 1 (Year 2). High starting points = working at 'greater depth'.
What are we doing about it
As you may know the Government anticipated that schools would need to do some catch-up work once they reopened and have provided funding to schools to help pupils catch up any missed learning. They have launched the ‘Universal Catch-up Premium’. We will be using our funding in the following ways:
- investing in additional reading books for our reading lessons and for take home reading books, especially at the higher levels;
- increasing the amount of time spent on teaching phonics in Reception, Year 1 and 2;
- teaching to pupils’ gaps. Teachers have a vast amount of knowledge about the gaps pupils have. They will be adjusting their teaching to make sure teaching includes these areas. This means during the autumn term they will be spending more time on teaching reading, writing and maths. Teachers will use opportunities in the FLCC for pupils to apply their knowledge in different ways. This means there will be less content taught in other subjects, teachers will be focusing on the ‘must know’ knowledge from the National Curriculum. Our knowledge organisers will be updated to reflect this;
- support for teachers at early stages of their career to provide ‘quality first teaching’ (mentoring and coaching);
- providing teachers with the devices and applications to be able to teach in school and from home if needed so that there is no further interruption to pupils learning, should we need to close a bubble;
For some pupils they will also have
- additional daily reading sessions in school;
- 1:1 maths tutoring, through ‘Third Space Maths’;
- small group teaching focused on writing skills;
- online vocabulary development;
- ‘live’ phonics information session for parents, so that they know how to support their child at home.
Your child’s assessments are now available for you to view on MCAS, please use these as a starting point for discussion in the upcoming parent consultation meetings.
Find out more about our assessment at Fielding here.