Maths on the Move is ready to relaunch

Navigating a new school year, tough enough at the best of times and this is not the best of times.

Lockdown saw teachers transform the way they teach, going above and beyond for their pupils. Yet the implications of four months without face-to-face learning are inescapable.

  • Children on average have spent 2.5 hours a day doing schoolwork during lockdown.
  • Only 17% have put in more than four hours a day.
  • Over two million have done no schoolwork, or less than an hour a day.

When you think that a typical school day is between six and seven hours, combine this with the fact that lockdown lasted for months, the reality hits of just how much learning time has been lost.

With the switch to home learning comes the risk of widening the attainment gap, exacerbating existing inequalities as access to resources, home set-up and level of family support all have a role to play in children’s home learning experience.

So, the question is now, what can be done to ensure this impact is not felt long-term?

What the government is doing:

The government has announced a one-off universal £650 million catch-up premium for the 2020 to 2021 academic year.

And with schools having flexibility with the funding, its use can be tailored to the school’s most pressing needs.

guide for schools has been published by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), providing evidence-based approaches that effectively support pupils when it comes to the task of catching up.

What PH Sports are doing:

With each new guideline and each new piece of advice, PH Sports have made sure to ask:

How can we adapt, change and evolve to support schools, teachers and pupils?

The threat of lifelong implications on children’s educational development demands readily available, evidence-based programmes of support.

And it just so happens we have one.

A suggested use of the catch-up premium is intervention programmes that meet a specific need, can be delivered to small groups, include regular sessions maintained over a sustained period, are carefully timetabled and allow for the monitoring of pupil progress.

Turns out our newly refreshed Maths on the Move (MOTM)  programme checks all of these boxes.

Autumn term kicks off with educators delivering a six-week programme of study focusing on mental maths covering several objectives from the national curriculum. So, there’s your well-targeted, regular sessions over a sustained period of time covered.

Experienced educators, learning materials and an online platform are all part of the MOTM programme with each child receiving a termly progress report. Monitoring of pupils’ progress: check. Accountability and justification for Ofsted: check and check.

We’ve been communicating with our schools over the past few weeks to discuss timetables and create risk assessments which are specific to your setting and in line with your policies. There’s that required careful timetabling.

What we can do together:

Deliver MOTM in your school.

Your safety, pupils’ safety and our team’s safety is top priority. So, what adjustments have we made?

Resources required for each lesson are reduced to only those that are essential. Meaning? Sessions can take place outside where possible. We have faith in the British weather (we think!)

Each child will also be given a personal whiteboard and pen in order to limit the sharing of resources (and the debates over who gets to write…).

As so frequently highlighted during lockdown (as well as the irony of it), the months we were to stay apart were months in which we came together (figuratively speaking) to support one another.

If you would like to chat through how we can collaborate to best support you and your pupils, you can call us on 01225 701830 or email us.