Year 7 Literacy & Numeracy Catch-Up Premium Expenditure and Impact 2019-20

At King’s Lynn Academy we received until 2020 a top up grant to fund additional support to help pupils who arrive at secondary well-below nationally expected levels to catch up.  This grant in 2019-20 was approximately £18,000and was spent in the following ways:

• Provision of HLTA support in both English and Mathematics to provide additional focussed support to those pupils needing to catch up
• Provision of reading programme in English, with 1-1 TA/HLTA support
• Close academic monitoring across all subjects, with resource targeted to those pupils most in need.

The impact of this work in 2019-20 was pleasing  As can be seen from the attached dataset, in English 12 of the 18 pupils supported by this measure made more accelerated progress than expected through Year 7.  3 pupils were absent at the end-of year assessment and 3 continue to work well-below expected levels despite the additional provision.  WRAT testing showed that those weakest readers made 9.25 months of reading progress in the 4 months between September 2020 and January 2021.

The efficacy of our Year 7 reading programme was investigated during our Ofsted inspection of October 2018 who found

‘Additional funding is used well to enable less-able readers to catch-up.  A reading programme and 1-1 support for these learners enables them to accelerate.’

In Maths, 7 of the 12 pupils supported in this way accelerated their progress, with only 4 not managing to do so.