#CovidCatapult

Any members of staff from all 5 schools are welcome to submit their application, but every application will need the support of the Headteacher. Joint applications from staff at two or more Foundation schools are also welcome, but in that instance would need the support of Headteachers at all of the schools involved in applying.

There is some urgency for these pilot projects to start before the end of the first term in the 2020/21 academic year, in order to remedy the learning losses of students affected by the lockdown period. For that reason, application deadlines are due by 16th October 2020 and the successful projects will be announced by 16th November 2020 with project funding available immediately for those projects to deploy.

There is no minimum grant award amount, but there is a maximum of £15,000 for a single project over the first two years. If a project is envisaged to continue beyond a two year cycle, it would need to plan on finding separate internal school funding or further external sources of grant contributions. If a project can demonstrate particular impact success at the end of two years, there may be an opportunity to re-apply for further Foundation funding in year three, but that project application will be evaluated alongside other project applications at the time.

The Foundation is interested in projects that can respond swiftly to the learning needs of a particular cohort, namely disadvantaged students at our five schools who are most affected by the lockdown. It is likely project mobilisation will take some portion of the 2020/21 academic year to begin, and that learning benefits will extend for those target students over the 2021/22 academic year as well. Applications which can embed longer term institutional capacity for disadvantaged students will be viewed favourably, but it is not a requirement that proposed projects extend beyond the initial two year duration envisaged. In order to demonstrate effective improvements in the learning gains of target beneficiary students, two academic years are needed.

The applications will be submitted to the Foundation Executive Team, who will score all applications and pass the ranked list to a panel of four independent Foundation Trustees, along with their recommendations. The Trustee panel will then meet to discuss all the project applications and make the final decision.

Yes, feedback will be available for all applications submitted. Those projects which are considered promising and meriting further development will be encouraged to submit again during the following year’s application rounds. Schools and staff are encouraged to take a longer-term view and continue to apply each year. In some cases, there may be internal school budget to support modified versions of the project proposals.

You do not need to present an exhaustive list of impact measurements in your proposal; one or two simple ones that are clearly providing evidence of student learning gains or attitudinal change will be sufficient. If your project grant is successfully awarded, you will have some time (and Foundation assistance) before project mobilisation to create a set of fuller impact metrics. Think carefully about exactly what change your proposed project activity is going to bring about for the learning of these students. Are they exposed to new content or learning styles? Are they simply spending more time-on-task? Is there an improved way the students are receiving the learning content? As a minimum, you will need to quantify how many students are regularly participating in your proposed project activity. You might want to include their GCSE or A-Level assessment results, or a standard value-added score that is being used already within daily classroom assessments. Or you might want to give the students a feedback survey at regular intervals to understand whether and how their attitude to a learning topic is changing over time. Generally, the best impact measurements will combine quantitative and qualitative methods, which may help not only measure raw learning progress but also provide some explanations as to why the learning gains are coming about.

The budget you propose does not need to be extensive or exact, but it should identify the core costs (is it people, hardware, new books, trips or something else) and whether they are recurring or one-off? It should also be a way to identify how many students your project proposal is targeting and how many input resources each of those students is likely to need. (You should also be confident that you will not need more than £15,000 in total from the Foundation, in order to implement your project.) One useful way to sense check your basic budget is to think about the total cost-per-pupil over the 2 year project duration. If you are only reaching 50 students in the two years for a total budget of £10,000, that equates to £200 per pupil. On its own that is not telling us much, but if you can bring down that cost down to £50 per pupil, your project would reach 200 students. If you can think of a way to reach more students with the same or nearly the same quality of learning outcomes, that will obviously provide better value for money. Applications which provide some thinking around student reach and value-for-money are likely to be more successful than those which don’t. If your project grant is successfully awarded, you will have some time (and Foundation assistance) before project mobilisation to create a more detailed budget, and to establish the reporting requirements around project spending.