Summer School

Summer School Aim

To support students starting Year 7 with a smooth transition to Elmgreen ‘offering a blend of academic education and enrichment activities’  (DfE Summer School Guidance March 2021).  Summer school gives students an opportunity to offer face to face academic and pastoral support before they start secondary school.  This is an on-going part of our good practice and strong Year 6 into Year 7 transition programme at Elmgreen.  

Context

The Government provided a new education recovery package for children and young people, a £700 million package. £200 million (including the final £100 million) was made available to secondary schools to deliver face-to-face summer schools. Schools were able to target provision based on pupils’ needs but the government suggested that schools may have wanted to initially target incoming year 7 pupils. It was projected that the average secondary school should receive around £22,000 extra for a summer provision for those pupils who need it the most, for example laying on additional clubs and activities. 

Funding, Accountability and Compliance

This year, Government funding was made available to all eligible schools, to be used for the provision and delivery of summer schools as part of the educational recovery programme.  Our Elmgreen Summer School took place over the course of one week from Monday 23 to Friday 27 August 2021, offering a blend of academic education and enrichment activities and was offered to all of our 180 Year 6 into 7 student cohort in compliance with meeting the funding requirements.  Our Year 9 into 10 peer mentors and Sixth Form mentors were used in our Summer School to support our Year 6 into Year 7 students in their learning activities.  

The Elmgreen School applied for Summer School funding claim, for a total of £47879.40 and we are pleased to announce that we were successful in receiving this total claim amount from the DfE. 

A breakdown of how it was spent is detailed in the overview below.

Overview:

Key headline successes:

Feedback from students and families was very positive.   

• 100% of parents/carers said that they thought that Summer School has been very useful/useful in supporting their child's transition to Elmgreen

• 97% of students said that they thought that Summer School has been useful/very useful in supporting their transition to Elmgreen

• 95% of families said that our communication with families regarding Summer School was excellent/good.

Here is what our students and families said:

“I loved summer school it was such good fun”

“It was pretty epic.  My daughter enjoyed everything about the week. All excellent”

“I think this has been a great start to joining Elmgreen School”

“The team-building exercises were brilliant and hugely beneficial to the children socially plus the level of teaching was great - I thought you’d be doing Year 6 revision but my daughter was buzzing from dissecting a sheep’s heart in science! She definitely felt she had a comprehensive taster of what is to come and felt both reassured in subjects she’s nervous about and excited to start school”

“My son loved the summer school”

“My daughter loved everything”

“I loved it. It was so much fun! I feel a bit less nervous about starting at Elmgreen. It was really nice to meet students from the other primary schools”

“I really enjoyed it thank you Elmgreen”

“It has been brilliant as my child has made some friends and feels comfortable at the school before term starts. It's much less daunting. Thanks so much for organising these summer schools for year 7 students!”

“Thank you for the effort to provide a great introduction to Elmgreen!”

“(Name) enjoyed lots of aspects of summer school, including the Maths, library, science and gardening. He’s had a fun but tiring week, thank you!”

“Excellent overall. Good idea to have it this end of the summer”

“(Name)  had a great week and is feeling really confident to start on Friday with new friends. Thank you!”