Year 7 Literacy and Numeracy Catch Up Premium

Review of Year 7 Literacy and Numeracy Catch-Up Premium 

Thirsk School and Sixth Form College was allocated £22,070 as part of the Year 7 Catch-Up initiative. When the mechanism of the Catch-Up Premium was established, schools were provided with an additional £500 for every student who had not achieved level 4 in Reading and/or Maths at Key Stage 2. Since changes to assessment methods were introduced in KS2, the funding is no longer linked to KS2 attainment. Instead it is a fixed amount based on 2015-16 funding, adjusted to reflect the cohort size. The aim of the funding is to help students who did not meet age-related expectations (ARE) in KS2 to ‘catch up’ with their peers during their first year at secondary school.

How we spent the allocation of funds 

The strategies employed during the last academic year included:

• Small group teaching and intervention programme in Maths led by a HLTA with a Maths specialism.
• One-to-one TA support for literacy through the ‘Catch-Up Literacy’ programme, including its associated resources.
• Literacy intervention through the Accelerated Reader Programme incorporating the STAR Reading assessment.
• Additional targeted books for the Learning Resource Centre.
• Baseline tests at the end of Year 6, conducted during our Transition Week, to gain an accurate benchmark and provide us with a detailed analysis of literacy and numeracy skills.
• Emotional support – depending on the needs of the individual, we responded by offering emotional and social support from our Inclusion Team.

Estimated Impact

In order to try to calculate the impact of our strategies, we have to use a measure from the end of year 7. There is no re-test of the KS2 assessments for those students who did not meet ARE, therefore we do not have a ‘like-for-like’ measure. Throughout KS3, we continue to assess our students against ARE, but as these are not nationally defined at KS3, the expectations are as we have defined them for students at the end of Year 7. We are therefore in a position to compare how many students met our school’s end of Year 7 expectations with how many students met the end of year 6 nationally defined expectations. The data below relates to students who were on our roll throughout Year 7 and remained on our roll in Year 8.