Responding to COVID-19

We recognise that the extended school closure linked to Covid-19 has had the potential to have a significant negative impact on the learning of our young people.  

As a result, we continue to have a robust plan in place that is designed to meet the specific needs of all of our young people and to support them to realise their full potential.  This plan continues to be reviewed regularly as we provide the support that our young people need and deserve.

Our recovery plan has been organised around the three stages outlined below.

Re-engage

Our aim is to continue to support students to return to a normal school experience, providing support and reassurance to enable them to do so.

Review

We continue to review the progress that students are making in their day-to-day education in school. As well as establishing any learning that has been lost, there needs to be a focus on assessing the speed with which students are ‘catching up’. We will also closely monitor the well-being of all students, ensuring all who require additional support are able to receive this.

Recover

As we have successfully re-engaged with day-to-day education in school, we continue to review our curriculum and at all times, the best interests of each young person will be at the heart of any alterations made. We also consider longer-term measures that will help to support the well-being of all students and, where appropriate, provide increasingly intensive support to the most vulnerable students who have faced the greatest challenges in successfully returning to school.

Key Elements of Our Recovery Plan

Curriculum Focus on Vital Content

We ensure that the core curriculum lesson time that we have with our students has the maximum impact. Extensive work has taken place to review the curriculum in each subject to ensure our teachers have been able to identify the knowledge and skills that will be vital to the success of their students. As a result, we can be confident that the learning that takes place focuses precisely upon this.

Digital Strategy

The school developed an approach to setting remote learning that was successful during the extended closure of schools from March to July 2020 and again from January to March 2021.

As a consequence of this approach, high numbers of students were regularly accessing learning throughout this period. Whilst we appreciate that there is no substitute for young people being in a classroom with their teacher, our approach helped us to reduce the learning deficit and place us in a strong position to recover.

We are now reflecting on the lessons we have learnt about how technology can ensure rapid progress within our day-to-day teaching practice. As well as this, we continue to use technology in sophisticated ways that help us to blur the boundaries between learning in school and at home. Furthermore, we have detailed contingency plans in place, which means that we are confident that we will be able to respond effectively in the event of any partial or total closure of schools in the future.

Further Literacy Development

Whilst literacy development is already identified as a key priority for the school, there is now an even greater focus upon this as a consequence of the loss of learning time. The introduction of the ‘Reciprocal Reading’ approach is a significant development in providing young people with a strategy that they can internalise and then apply to enable them to extract meaning from complex texts.  

In addition to the adaptations to teacher planning to provide additional literacy support, we provide a comprehensive support programme for students identified as requiring further intervention.

Focused and High-Impact Intervention

Our starting point to ensure that students make exceptional progress is in carefully sequencing our curriculum and then ensuring excellent teaching and learning takes place in lessons.  However, where we identify that it is necessary, we operate focused and high-impact intervention programmes with carefully targeted students.  At times, we create time during the course of the regular school day to provide the additional teaching input that our students need.  In other instances, we operate programmes outside of the core school day and these then take place after school or as part of a holiday intervention programme where this is appropriate.  

Social and Emotional Needs

Ultimately, our priority as a school is to support our young people to thrive and they can only do so when they are happy and secure. We recognise that our young people have had many different experiences over recent years and that we must provide a wide variety of support to ensure a positive return to day-to-day education. Thinking about the needs of all students and the specific needs of individuals is at the heart of our recovery approach and the school has extensive pastoral and welfare support in place to allow this.