100 million hours of catch-up tuition offered to students effected by the pandemic
A pupil has told us she feel like she missed out while being home schooled
A new education recovery plan has been launched by the Government to help pupils catch-up on lost learning due to the pandemic.
The Department for Education has announced over £4.8 billion to support education recovery. Up to 100 million hours of tuition will be provided to children aged 5 to 16 over the next three years.
Primary school aged students can access catch-up tuition in literacy, numeracy and science, while secondary school aged students can access catch-up tuition in English, humanities, maths, modern foreign languages, and science.
Mark Critchard is Vice Principle of The Regis School in Bognor Regis.
He said: "It's worth making the point that there are so many students in so many year groups facing big external exams. Different students have gaps in different areas so the fact we can put on bespoke intervention programmes with the catch up programme we've been afforded is really valuable.
"From a teaching and learning perspective you've got one hand tied behind your back (during the pandemic) trying to get the same results, same outcomes as you would in a classroom.
"On top of that you've got attendance, punctuality and safeguarding issues that you're wanting to check up on and making sure the students feel safe and welcome. It's so much harder to do remotely."
We also spoke to Maxie Wheeler, a student at The Regis School who has already benefitted from the catch-up tuition.
She said: "I found it quite difficult to concentrate (learning from home) and I felt a lot of what I should've learnt, I didn't. I didn't catch up on all the notes because of the Wi-Fi connection and things like that so I missed out on a chunk of learning.
"It was really stressful at first because I couldn't understand everything. It wasn't as easy as going up to your teacher at the end of the lesson and saying 'I don't understand this', I'd have to write them an email."