Targeting Pupil Premium children at risk of missing age-related expectations
The only loose budget we had in school was in the Pupil Premium fund, so we targeted the Third Space Learning 1-to-1 tuition towards Pupil Premium children who we felt may not reach age related expectations and they’ve certainly been very positive about it.
I think that with particular pupils that are hard to reach in the classroom and are quite needy in terms of attention, having that 1-to-1 person on the end of the headset that’s totally theirs is really good for their engagement.
We saw the tuition in action and knew we needed to sign up!
We had an invitation for a Third Space Learning open day at a primary school in Stafford, and our deputy head invited me to go and have a look at the intervention in action. I was very impressed with what I saw; with the security, how the programme ran, the dialogue between students and teachers. We just signed up straight away following that meeting!
We’ve seen a big improvement in reasoning skills
“We use the SATs Intervention programme which has been fantastic for our Year 6 pupils. In particular, the reasoning questions have been great, and the fact that the questions that come up are really similar to the ones that crop up in SATs papers has worked well for us.”
Our pupils were very good at procedure and simple arithmetic, but actually applying that knowledge in problem solving was proving to be an issue. We found that with the opportunity to talk through those problems with the tutor, almost on a stage by stage basis, that they were thinking aloud and it has given a huge boost to their reasoning skills.
“It’s made a really big difference, not just in terms of results, which obviously count for us, but for the children and their confidence in maths. They’re leaving our school now thinking ‘I’m a mathematician’ so thank you very much for that.”
Our governors were really impressed with the safety aspect
It’s a relief to know that the conversations (lessons) are recorded with the students. A good example of the safeguarding aspect in action was when one of our students in told their tutor that they were feeling particularly stressed and weren’t sleeping.
This was during the week of SATs, and straight away the following day we were sent a message by Third Space to say that the tutor had raised a safeguarding concern and wanted to make us aware. We just thought that it was so impressive that the child had built up a relationship with the same tutor through the weekly sessions, and that the tutor was vigilant and reported it. We were really pleased with that.
Watch a session in action
See how Skye guides pupils through a full one-to-one session.
