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14th September 2017 - Have you attended a Review and Refresh session?

Additional courses

Have you been trained by Catch Up® and attended the three half-day sessions? Have you been delivering the intervention? Remember that there’s a lot more to your training and support package, including the ‘Review and Refresh’ session, available to all Catch Up® trained staff at no additional cost!

The Review and Refresh session takes place after the initial training and gives you the chance to do just what it says! It provides an opportunity to ‘review’ your Catch Up® delivery so far and/or to ‘refresh’ your understanding of the Catch Up® intervention and process! There is a Review and Refresh session for Catch Up® Literacy and one for Catch Up® Numeracy. Attendees always find it very useful to share good practice and ideas with colleagues, as well as being able to clarify points with a Catch Up® Accredited Trainer – asking some excellent questions!

During the Spring and Summer terms of 2017, our Catch Up® Accredited Trainers were delighted to welcome back members of the Catch Up® Community and to hear about the fantastic work going on in schools and other settings, and the amazing progress of the learners. The sessions, mostly taking place in our Regional Training Centres, always have a real buzz of excitement as deliverers share their stories. It has been a pleasure to once again see deliverers who were trained a few months ago, plus those who have been using Catch Up® for a number of years!

One of our trainers, Clare Manghan, has run Review and Refresh sessions for both Catch Up® Literacy and Catch Up® Numeracy during this time. She told us that it has been really enjoyable to meet up again with familiar faces and hear about the successes and achievements of Catch Up® learners.

She said, “It has been so inspiring to hear about the difference Catch Up® has made to struggling learners. Many attendees came along with data from standardised tests, showing huge leaps in reading and maths ages – some learners making over 2 years’ progress in just a few months! Nearly every deliverer spoke of the increase in confidence they witnessed, and the willingness of learners to ‘have a go’ and becoming much more positive about their literacy or numeracy skills.”

Clare explained how the Review and Refresh sessions are designed to be flexible to meet the needs of the attendees. She has found popular topics for discussion to be: developing resources, monitoring progress, moving a learner onto the next Catch Up® level, and how to liaise with other school staff and parents. She recalled one particular discussion about the organisation of resources: “The ‘Catch Up® team’ from one school shared their approach of keeping their numeracy resources in a central place, where they could all access them and build up activity ideas together. One had used ‘measures’ regularly to support the learners’ understanding, such as a clock face and different sized rulers and measuring tapes. This started an excellent group discussion of other useful resources to use, with lots of ideas of good ways to store the apparatus. Everyone agreed that having your own ‘kit’ was vital, and that you only needed a few key things which can be reused.”

Clare told us that attendees found the opportunity to share ideas and refresh their understanding of the Catch Up® process very reassuring. “Some trainees attend the session feeling they might not be ‘doing it right’, but they always leave feeling confident they are doing a fantastic job and really making a difference. They speak passionately about the purpose of the three parts of the Catch Up® session; for example, one TA shared with the group how the prepared reading part of her Catch Up® Literacy sessions had ‘unlocked texts’ for her learners, giving them the confidence to read with much more independence. One had even nagged their parent to get them a library ticket, as they were so keen to start borrowing books and read at home!”

Clare went on to explain how the attendees have also found it a useful opportunity to remind themselves of the many support tools and resources available. She told us, “I often find that trainees are grateful to be pointed to the parent/carer leaflets which are available, and the new classroom liaison sheets. Supporting the learners to apply what they have learnt in their Catch Up® sessions is increasingly a topic for discussion during the Review and Refresh session, and these tools are always well received to help with this.”

Look out for a Review and Refresh session at your nearest Regional Training Centre. You can find details of all the additional sessions available to you via the ‘Training’ tab in your user account on the Catch Up® website. Attending is part of your training and support package, so don’t miss out! Don’t forget, you can attend a Review and Refresh session as many times as you would like – just log in, and book your place! We look forward to seeing you and hearing about the fantastic work you are doing!


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