Understanding the ‘Covid Catch-Up Plan’ and Our Next Steps

The government recently shared a press release regarding their ‘Billion pound Covid catch-up plan to tackle the impact of lost teaching time’. For parents who have spent the past several months unsure of when their children will be returning to school, concerned about how school closures have disrupted crucial stages of their early development, this is certainly positive news. After hearing the calls to support schools in the recovery of children’s learning this year, the government are now working towards ensuring this lost time is made up for. 

The £1 billion investment will be divided between a £650 million fund which will be shared across all state primary and secondary schools in England, as well as a National Tutoring Programme, worth £350 million, which will increase access to tuition for the most disadvantaged young people. Head teachers and School Leaders will decide how the money is spent, with this expected to be largely focused on small group tuition, as well as getting the right resources to facilitate the scheme. 

Since a third of pupils are not engaging with set work at the moment, and it being common knowledge that children do not learn as well at home as they do in school, this investment is a vital step in helping students catch up in the coming academic year. We hope the funding empowers primary education leaders to implement strategies focused on refreshing and reigniting the love for learning core subjects such as Writing. 

At Love Writing Co., we know how essential it is to secure sound literacy and writing skills for your children from a young age. The Education Endowment Foundation draws attention to the long-term negative impact of beginning secondary school without secure literacy skills in their recent Covid-19 Support Guide. With this new scheme, we hope literacy and writing will be high on the agenda of primary schools to ensure all children are advancing at their correct level. 

Parents have been doing the brilliant job of home-schooling their children throughout lockdown and we cannot celebrate this enough. We have loved hearing about how much your children enjoy the Love Writing Academy as well as seeing all the progress being made with our activity packs. Now more than ever, we are trying to do the best we can as a company to facilitate your efforts by supplying both free digital resources as well as ensuring our physical products are best suited to helping primary school children become amazing writers for when they return to school this academic year and beyond. 

We are ready to play our part in actively helping parents and children transition back to school in September. We have taken our first steps and created new activity sheets for 3-9-year-olds which have gone up on the website for your children to complete over summer. We are also in the process of developing our ‘Catch-Up Campaign’ and partnering with other organisations to ensure children gain the writing skills they need both in and outside of school. At Love Writing Co., we want to make sure no child gets left behind. 

Be sure to keep an eye on our social media and our e-newsletters, as we will be updating our plans for our ‘Catch Up Campaign’ soon. 

From the Love Writing Team