Curriculum Support & Intervention
Curriculum Support & Interventions
At KGGS there is a long tradition of offering our students support or revision sessions in addition to the formal curriculum taught in timetabled lessons.
Curriculum and pastoral staff monitor the progress of all students carefully to identify those who would benefit from additional help, which might be offered in or out of lessons.
To ensure students reach their potential, a comprehensive range of supportive interventions is offered, to implement a far-reaching programme of sessions to ensure all our learners have the chance to address any misconceptions or lack of confidence they have with individual topics.
At KGGS, we work hard to ensure support offered to learners is dovetailed with activities and resources funded by the Pupil Premium and funding for Special Educational Needs & Disability.
Go straight to the SEND page here Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School - SEND
Go straight to the Pupil Premium page here Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School - Pupil Premium
Assessment Tools
Assessment tools, such as quizzes, polls, and electronic assignment submission featured in Microsoft Teams - have been embedded into our normal ways of working, where it has been purposeful and appropriate to do so.
Low-stakes assessment-for-learning tasks enable staff in all subjects to promptly identify students' knowledge-gaps and these strategies are integral to how we implement the curriculum.
Diagnostic tools - such as those for cognitive ability and reading ages, and a web-based Lexia Reading Programme - continue to be utilised to ensure gaps in core skills are addressed quickly across the school.
Key Stage Three
Curriculum support in KS3 is focused largely on the core skills which underpin the whole curriculum, such as reading, writing, and mathematics. Our aim is to ensure we identify students who are less confident in these areas, so that we can put in place the right support early on.
We continue to evolve the KGGS Reading Project, launched during the summer term of 2020. This brings together the work of the English Faculty, School Librarian, the SENDCo, and our Literacy Support Lead (an additional Part Time Teacher of English) to ensure students in Years 7, 8 & 9 can access the resources, reading mentoring, and literacy-focused activities which enable them to raise their reading ages, and read and write with confidence in all their subjects.
As part of this project, we have invited well-known authors into school to promote wider reading and further engage readers of all abilities with the processes of reading and writing.
Additional capacity for teaching we have created in Mathematics has also enabled us to offer additional skills-based support in their lessons - to give them the confidence they need to learn well in maths lessons, and in all lessons where mathematical skills are needed.
Where students need it, they are offered additional Numeracy sessions out of lessons, to increase their confidence and support their use of Maths across their subjects.
Key Stage Four & Key Stage Five
A comprehensive range of Subject Support Sessions are offered in lunchtimes and after school in faculties, throughout Key Stage Four and Five, along with subject revision days in holidays in the run up to public examinations for Year Eleven and Year Thirteen students.
Subject mentors are also assigned to those students who would benefit from academic support of an older student in subjects where they hope to feel more confident and accelerate their progress.
All subject areas offer enrichment activities as part of the Wider Curriculum to extend learning from lessons and inspire the intellectual curiosity of all our learners.
Members of the Senior Leadership Team also act as mentors for students in Year Eleven who needs a holistic mentoring approach to support their progress across several subjects.
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Curriculum Recovery Plan | [pdf 252KB] |
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Amendments to the Formal Curriculum
Following those periods when we were locked down nationally, we are very pleased to have been able to return to a full broad and challenging curriculum, in all subjects. Teachers, however, continue to address remaining gaps in learning; and seek to capitalise on skills learners honed during periods of remote learning, such as those related to using IT, independent study, and electronic assignments.
In practical subjects, such as those in the Arts, PE, and Design & Technology, which required creative solutions during periods of remote learning, we have re-introduced the full range of practical learning opportunities offered prior to the pandemic.
Assessment Tools
Assessment tools, such as those quizzes, polls, and electronic assignment submission featured in Microsoft Teams - which enabled teaching staff to monitor the progress of all their students when working remotely for extended periods of time - have subsequently been embedded into our normal ways of working, where it has been purposeful and appropriate to do so.
Low stakes assessment-for-learning tasks enabled staff in all subjects to promptly identify students' knowledge-gaps upon their return to learning in the physical classroom, and these continue to be integral to how we implement the curriculum.
Diagnostic tools - such as those for cognitive ability and reading ages, and web-based Lexia Reading Programme - continue to be utilised to ensure target setting is accurate and the gaps in core skills are addressed quickly across the school.
Key Stage Three
Curriculum Catch-up and Recovery in KS3 is focused largely on the core skills which underpin the whole curriculum, such as reading, writing, and mathematics. Our aim is to ensure we identify students who are less confident in these areas, so that we can put in place the right support early on.
We continue to evolve the KGGS Reading Project, launched during the summer term of 2020. This brings together the work of the English Faculty, School Librarian, the SENDCo, and our Literacy Support Lead (an additional Part Time Teacher of English) to ensure students in Years 7, 8 & 9 can access the resources, reading mentoring, and literacy-focused activities which enable them to raise their reading ages, and read and write with confidence in all their subjects.
As part of this project, we have invited well-known authors into school to promote wider reading and further engage readers of all abilities with the processes of reading and writing.
Additional capacity for teaching we have created in Mathematics has enabled us to utilise the skills of our SEND team to offer our KS3 mathematicians additional support in their lessons - to give them the confidence they need to learn well in maths lessons, and in all lessons where mathematical skills are needed.
Key Stage Four & Key Stage Five
In KS4 we have utilised the National Tutoring Programme and GCSE POD to support not only those learners for whom we receive the Pupil Premium, but also any other students who needed individualised subject-specific support.
We have embraced the government's school-Led Tutoring offer and utilised this fully to offer well over a thousand hours of tutoring across many subjects to learners in Year 11 initially, but also in Years 7 to 10.
In addition to this, staff have offered many out-of-lesson subject specific support and revision sessions for students in KS4 & KS5 - at lunchtimes, afterschool, and in the school holidays.