Supporting cast: how one Trust helped disadvantaged students through lockdown

The seven academies in the Laidlaw Schools Trust are typical of the varied patchwork that is school provision in Britain. Two of its three secondaries in the North East serve some of the poorest communities in the country, while the third, Sedgefield Community College, is in a less deprived area. Most of its secondary student cohort is white, with the exception of Excelsior Academy in Newcastle, which has a significant EAL intake. Far from being an impediment, the Trust believes this diversity gives it strength – allowing its schools to cross-pollinate best practice and learn from one another.

Alan Dunne, the Senior Strategic Lead for English for the secondary schools in the Trust, says as lockdown continued and the disruption to learning persisted, he feared students, particularly those from challenging backgrounds, would suffer badly. “When we returned in September last year, we had various catch-up plans. But from an English perspective it wasn’t obvious that a lot of school had been missed.

“We had to revisit some content, but most students had retained their skills. Our Year 11s could still write an essay and our Year 10s could write a piece of narrative writing to a standard that we would expect. The bit that was missing was progress between March and September – it wasn’t perhaps at the level we would want, but I don’t think there was much in the way of regression.”

It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though, he says. At first, during the initial lockdown, they struggled to engage students. “Only after Easter last year did we start to get into the swing of virtual lessons. And it’s only been in the last lockdown that we have really upped our offer with even more regular live input. But it took some time to bed in online learning – for the staff as well as the students.”

Does he think reading suffered less because it’s relatively easy for families to support compared to maths and science? “Yes, but we put a lot out there too – we invested early on in an e-reading system, so students could access books on tablets and phones for free.” The schools worked hard to minimise digital deprivation, Alan says. “The Laidlaw Foundation, which is our sponsor, donated enough money to enable us to buy devices for all students that needed one.”

Performance of FSM students

The Trust also hasn’t seen the gap between FSM and non-FSM students worsen – in fact 80% of the pupil premium students at Excelsior, which represent 59% of the entire student cohort, have met the standard for their reading ages that would be expected in non-Covid years. Alan suspects this is because the majority of students have had a fairly full diet of online learning and have engaged with it. But while broader learning support has been possible, teachers have found it difficult to offer personalised interventions remotely.

“We put our weakest readers on personalised phonics provision in school. But that’s been nigh on impossible to provide in lockdown,” says Alan. “It’s the same with reciprocal reading. We haven’t been able to offer the drilled-down, specialist personalised learning support that we would’ve liked to have offered.”

Overall, however, reading performance at the Trust’s two secondaries in deprived areas, Excelsior and Academy 360, has held up remarkably well. “There wasn’t any widening of the gap between FSM and non-FSM students in the same cohort between March and September of last year – it’s been more or less the same in terms of reading age. In fact, I think those Year 10 students were in a much better place when they started Year 11 in September because we had put so much work into building up their confidence in English language skills.”

Post-lockdown priorities

Alan says the Trust’s priorities for reading now children have returned from lockdown will build on its detailed literacy policy. “We’ve really invested in reciprocal reading as a cross-curricula reading tool. We try to break down the mechanics of reading to ensure that the experience students get in English lessons they also get in science and humanities lessons. We’ve taken the recommendations from the EFF and looked at how we can embed them in our teaching model. And we’re looking, too, at how we teach vocabulary. 

The different schools have different priorities, he says. “Excelsior is in a very good place in terms of ensuring students get extra support where they need it with reading ages, and Academy 360 has really developed that this year, too. Sedgefield starts from a much better place and is now also ensuring that the tiered intervention model piloted at Excelsior is in place.”

Now the schools are back, the intention is to get a full round of NGRT with every student to try to judge what the impact of lockdown has been. “The question now is are the issues apparent in September still issues and if they’re not, what else do we do differently. And if they are, do we implement the same model we had before or do we change it slightly?