COVID-19 Catch up Premium

The coronavirus pandemic caused the greatest interruption to learning in schools since the second world war.  Although KLA remained open throughout both extended school closures for pupils we deemed to be vulnerable, and fore the children of key worker parents, and we had the greatest number of vulnerable secondary pupils attend of any secondary school in Norfolk, the vast majority of our pupils were forced to learn at home for two out of the past three terms.  This clearly was more achievable for some of our pupils than others, and upon our latest return to school in March 2021 we quickly undertook some very light touch assessments to ascertain which pupils demonstrated the greatest level of need.  We have therefore identified three groups of pupils who are going to require significant additional support to overcome the negative effects of these closures on their educational outcomes.

• Pupils in Year 9 appear to have considerably lower levels of knowledge retention than those in either Year 7 or Year 8.  This we attribute to the new KLA curriculum which is much more solidly embedded in lower years than in Year 9.
• Pupils with weak prior levels of attendance, in whom we found a strong correlation between that fact and lower levels of engagement in online learning
• Pupils with weaker reading skills, whose reading skills were not able to benefit from the regular, structured teaching of reading that we provide in school at normal times and whose reading has not developed as we believe it would have normally.