The Aims of Catch Up Funding

• To provide a programme of interventions in literacy and numeracy to ensure that those students who join us with learning gaps in literacy and numeracy have those gaps closed.
• To develop a programme which ensures that those students catch up in year 7, stay caught up.
  To ensure that those students who fall behind subsequent to joining Wyvern are able to catch up.
• This is a recognition that students can fall behind due to many complex reasons at any point in their education and that our catch-up work needs to address this issue – not just the issue of students joining us with learning gaps in literacy and numeracy.
• To diagnose any unidentified learning difficulty or special educational need.
• To provide a provision map which shows how the interventions we provide match the learning gaps/needs of our students; to define the entry criteria for students accessing each intervention and the exit criteria for leaving it.

Interventions in years 7 and 8

The Catch-up Premium provides schools with additional funding for students joining the college with literacy and numeracy levels below age related expectations. The purpose of this funding is to enable schools to deliver additional support, such as individual tuition or intensive support in small groups. At Wyvern, we use the additional funding to provide each year 7 child with additional support in literacy and/or mathematics to reach their full potential. We assess individual pupil need to inform the best way to use the additional funding which may include:

• Individual tuition in addition to classroom teaching.
• Additional staffing to support differentiated learning experiences.
• Intensive small-group tuition.
• Purchasing external services and materials to add to those provided by the school.

Diagnostic assessments pinpoint the problem areas students have with their literacy and numeracy so that the most appropriate support can be put in place:

• For students with difficulties in reading fluency, confidence and accuracy, we run a Reading Ambassadors’ programme.
• For students with difficulties in reading comprehension, we run a Read On programme and use Reading Plus.
• For students with visual tracking difficulties and a restricted vocabulary, we use Reading Plus.
• For students with difficulties in spelling, we run precision spelling groups.
• For students with difficulties in numeracy, we run Numeracy Ambassadors.

Students with low prior attainment in reading, Writing and Maths are identified by class teachers for additional in-class interventions too. These might involve:

• Chunking: breaking information, tasks, instructions and concepts down into sequences of bite size parts or steps for students to work on incrementally and build up.
• Taking an oral to literate approach: helping students develop and organise ideas first through talk before putting them into written form.
• Pre-learning: pre-teaching vocabulary, ideas and concepts before students encounter these in their usual context.
• Modelling the task and work required so that students know what to aim for.
• Providing additional worked examples for students to learn from.
• Deconstructing good work so that students know how to construct it.
• Scaffolding: providing additional adult guidance and involvement in the completion of tasks.

Interventions in years 9-11

The college has a mantra of “same bar, different ladders” when it comes to supporting low attaining students. This means that we still expect high standards of work form these students but will give them additional support to reach these standards. A really good example of this is our approach to English and Maths GCSEs. Whereas some schools, allow some students to do Entry Level GCSEs (working below a grade 1), we at Wyvern believe that all students, with the right support, can achieve GCSE grades in both English and Maths GCSEs.

In our experience, some students struggle to achieve well at GCSE Maths and English because they have difficulty in remembering the key concepts and ideas from previous lessons which are needed to understand the new learning in current lessons. To address this issue, students study for GCSEs English and Maths as normal but choose one less option so that additional lesson time can be spent consolidating the essential concepts of the curriculum, including Functional Skills.