While there were still general concerns around the grading system, and what the GCSE would end up looking like, the school had done as much as it could to prepare it’s 2023 cohort for whatever was to come. Whilst other schools in the surrounding area struggled to form a system in which they could deliver lessons to children online initially, Reach had already planned and prepared for the lockdown in early March of 2020. Students were sorted into small groups with a coach assigned to them that would check in regularly every week, lessons were uploaded in the morning with the deadline set to be the end of the normal school day, and there was enough support from those in school via emails that students were able to effectively learn from a distance, though the system wasn’t perfect.

However, that wasn’t the full extent of what Reach did. To all key worker children, the school offered to have them learn on-site with a small group of teachers directly managing them and offering support with any of the work. It meant that the students could maintain their usual working routines, while still being able to seek the help that they needed from specialised teachers immediately. Reach offered the chance for its students to take home chromebooks should they have no other means of working from home, and many other pieces of equipment were lended out, such as books from the library and musical instruments.

Finally, the system in which Reach adopted to assess the grades of its Year 11 students was thought out carefully due to the ever-changing guidelines at the time. The pupils sat through 6 weeks of mock-exam papers from the previous years, which were then marked in accordance to the assorted mark schemes. The children’s classwork was then taken into consideration, before their homework was judged. The quality of each of these three elements eventually formed an overall grade, which then was cross-checked thoroughly between different departments within the school to ensure that it was a fair judgement. Reach hit the ground running when it came to assigning online work, as well as it’s assessment of student’s current grades, however this wasn’t all the school did during this time. During the lockdown, lunches were handed out to Free School Meal Students around about the usual time, along with free sanitary products during a time where those were an extreme luxury.

Overall, it’s clear why Reach became such a success story following the pandemic and it’s subsequent lockdowns. No time was wasted in delivering lessons to children, the school remained in frequent contact with students to ensure they were coping well, and they made sure that every student had the capacity to learn and succeed - evident by the eventual results they achieved.