Coronavirus (COVID-19) catch-up funds

Funding for catch-up has changed significantly since the early days of the pandemic and continues to evolve. This page therefore focuses on how we have used the funds at Woodford and what we intend to do with them during the academic year 2022-23

Up to the end of the academic year 2021-22 funding had been used for the following:

• Paying teachers to deliver catch-up sessions to identified groups or subjects out of normal school hours (normally on weekends or during school holidays).
• To pay for external tutoring or coaching of small groups of students where this cannot be provided by the existing teaching staff.
• To pay for external examination preparation workshops to supplement those already delivered in school - particularly important in 2022 when the first set of external examinations since 2019 were being prepared for.
• Purchase of resources, such as texts and study guides, to make up for lost learning or to aid understanding of missed practical work.
• To pay for additional counselling in order to increase our support of vulnerable students and others whose mental health has been adversely affected by the pandemic and lock-down.
• To pay for tailored sessions in order to smooth transition points, especially transfer from primary school, to Year 7 and induction into the Sixth Form.
• To pay for the additional costs incurred as a consequence of opening the school outside normal hours (eg caretakers’ overtime).

How The Effect Of Expenditure On Educational Attainment Was Assessed.

In large part the programme was judged a success if the pupils involved in achieving broadly the same outcomes that we would expect if the pandemic had not intervened. This was assessed by scrutiny of:

• Work produced in lessons, exercise books etc.
• Pupil engagement in lessons and their ability to answer questions and problem solve.
• Internal examination and assessment grades.
• Feedback from students about their confidence levels in their academic subjects.
• GCSE and A Level grades 2022.

Our evaluation so far suggests that the programme of support has been a success. We were especially pleased to note the extremely good results achieved at both GCSE and A Level in 2022. In many cases these were even better than the grades that had been achieved when using Centre Assessed Grades in 2020 and 2021.

2022-23

Although we still used some of the residual funding for resources aimed at aiding catch-up where needed, our main focus was on additional tuition. This was subject-specific and the vast majority was delivered in-house, although where necessary we also utilised external providers.

We used a combination of assessment data and feedback from subject and pastoral staff to determine who to target for tuition. Tuition was delivered either one-to-one or in small groups after school. The bought-in tuition was delivered virtually.

There were three tranches of tuition, one in each term. Those in the autumn and spring terms were largely targeted at Years 11 and 13. Spring term tutees were those who we could not accommodate in the autumn tranche and those we felt would benefit from a second round of tuition. The summer sessions were targeted at Year 10.

Tuition was provided in the following subjects: Art (Autumn, Spring), Classics (Autumn), Computer Science (Autumn), English (Autumn, Spring, Summer), Food & Nutrition (Autumn), French (Autumn, Spring), Geography (Autumn), German (Autumn, Spring), History (Autumn, Spring, Summer), Mathematics (Autumn, Spring, Summer), Music (Autumn), Physical Education (Autumn), Science (Autumn, Spring)

We are still evaluating the outcomes and determining what, if any, school-led tuition to lay on for the forthcoming academic year.