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Exceptional Education at the Heart of the Community

Exceptional Education at the Heart of the Community

Summer School

Two years ago, we received a grant from the Department for Education to fund a summer school program for incoming Year 6 students. We invited all students with a place in our Year 7 cohort to attend and were thrilled when over 80 students and their families chose to do so. We employed 19 members of our current staff, including two former students, and delivered our program over the course of a single week. The broad timetable for which is shown below.

The amount of funding received was £25,735. A simplified breakdown of how the funding was spent is as follows:

Teaching and Support Staff Costs, £18,297
Lesson and Art Supplies, Snacks, and Reading Books, £5,716
Trips (Entrance Tickets and Travel Costs), £1,722
The summer school was designed to achieve three key outcomes: to induct new students into our school culture and way of doing school, to deliver catch-up lessons to help cover the learning lost due to COVID-19, and to build cultural capital through engaging enrichment activities and trips.
 

Induction

We designed a series of induction sessions that took place on the very first day of summer school. These were led by our Head of Year 7, Ms. Bajulaiye, and a team of experienced teachers. Students were sorted into their houses as they entered our auditorium, and were introduced to our school values, rules, and class systems. They spent their time practicing how to move around corridors, how to respond to consequence, how to address adults appropriately, and how to achieve amazing results in lessons.
 
   
 

Catch-Up Lessons

To maximise learning during our catch-up lessons, these lessons were only on fundamental skills of Literacy and Numeracy. Our lessons were planned or adapted by subject knowledge specialists (we adapted our Literacy lessons from an Oak National unit), and delivered by experienced teachers, including two subject specialists for all numeracy lessons. Students also had 40 minutes of whole-group reading every morning, DEAR on the timetable. The first three DEAR sessions were spent reading a sequence of increasingly challenging short stories, and the final DEAR session allowed students to read their personal reading book, chosen for them by their teachers and gifted to them on the last day of summer school.

  

Enrichment

The final thrust of the summer school program was to provide engaging enrichment opportunities for our students. All students in the program went on a trip to the Globe Theatre and Kew Gardens, and our timetable included two sculpting sessions planned and delivered by our art teacher, Ms. Blakeney. Students also participated in a Wednesday four-way capture-the-flag competition and constructed load-bearing spaghetti and marshmallow towers, as well as taking part in a number of activities in House Groups designed to build rapport and allow students to make meaningful connections with each other.