Pulling together for the 20 per cent

A programme to improve attainment for vulnerable, special educational needs or disabled pupils is having a powerful effect, writes Nick Bannister.

Headteacher Paul Green tells an affecting story of an 11-year-old boy which highlights just what is at stake with the 20 per cent of pupils nationwide described as vulnerable or having special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND).

“He came to us in Year 7 with a SEN statement,” said Paul, head of Lyng Hall Specialist Sports College in Coventry. “All the professionals were saying that he would not cope with mainstream education.

“You have got to continue supporting and seeking out ways to enable these children to make progress because in my experience at some point something engages, sometimes quite unexpectedly, and they start to make dramatic progress. If we don’t maintain our investment in these children from day one this can be missed. It wasn’t until Year 9 that things began to look up for him and he began to make dramatic progress.

“If we had written him off at Year 7 we wouldn’t have been constantly probing and supporting him and that moment would not have been noticed or encouraged.

“This year he started a PE degree at Wolverhampton University.”

It’s the fear of pupils like the one in Paul Green’s story falling through the net and not getting the benefit of such support that motivated the national roll out of the Achievement for All (AfA) programme.

The programme, run by new educational charity Achievement for All 3As, in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Department for Education, seeks to plug any gaps through giving schools bespoke support in four key areas: school leadership, teaching and learning, parental engagement and improving wider outcomes. A coach works with a ‘school champion’ to devise a tailor made programme that aims to improve pupil progress, parental engagement, participation of pupils in all school activities and give pupils access to wider opportunities.

The desire to tackle underachievement in the 20 per cent of children classified as either vulnerable or with SEND has gained considerable momentum in the past 12 months, with a Green Paper published last spring and a new measure of the progress of the lowest attaining pupils imminent.

Achievement for All started out in 2009 as a pilot developed in conjunction with the National College and involved 454 schools across 10 local authorities. It went national in September with another 225 schools and a further 450 are set to join in the new year.

At Lyng Hall Paul and his team used the programme to bring in a new staffing structure that included the redefining of support staff and how they work with SEND and vulnerable pupils and their families. Teaching assistants, learning mentors, cover supervisors and family support workers were transformed into a 20 strong group of associate teachers.

“Associate teachers are there to work for kids with significant social, emotional difficulties whose families need to overcome real challenges in order for these children to succeed at school. Their role is to get kids in a place where families are supporting them and they have a positive attitude to learning,” he explained.

“We had one parent who was having panic attacks so she kept her daughter of school so she could be with her. Associate teachers worked with the family to put a whole raft of support in place so that the daughter could go back to school. “

The AfA approach has helped towards a dramatic impact upon results, says Paul Green. “Using Fischer Family Trust data 42 per cent of SEND pupils were predicted 5 A*-C GCSEs but in fact 83 per cent achieved that benchmark.

“The work that kids do is highly personalised at Key Stage 4. For me that means that children who are being successful are supported but when they are not being successful we change things.”

The initiative has also transformed attendance from 89 per cent to 96 per cent in two years. Persistent absence has dropped - from 12.5 per cent to 1.8 per cent - during the same period.

Lyng Hall has now halved the number of pupils classed as having SEND. But the approach does raise some concerns for Paul and his team.

“While we have been able to improve the attainment of SEND pupils to the point where half of them no longer have that classification this means that our remaining SEND pupils will have quite extreme support needs and their progress won’t compare as favourably with SEND pupils in other schools.

“Ofsted is looking more closely at SEND which is good. More work does need to be done on how we now define SEND,” he said.

Tredworth Junior School is in a deprived part of central Gloucester. The school has been involved in the programme from the start and is this year heading for lead school status, which will see it sharing its expertise and support with other schools keen to learn from its approach with SEND and vulnerable pupils.

Engaging parents has been the touchstone for change in the way SEND and vulnerable pupils are supported at Tredworth, said deputy headteacher Paul Reedman. “Bringing parents more closely in on their children’s learning has been the most beneficial influence in raising attendance, achievement and tackling lateness and persistent absences,” he said.

“The real challenge for us was to reach that community in a way that wasn’t patronising, through a range of methods.”

One of those methods has been structured conversations with parents.

Teachers are regularly given a day away from the classroom for a series of 30 minute in-depth conversations. Parents can leave their youngsters in a crèche at the school during the meeting.

“It allows us to have a longer conversation than is traditional during parents’ evenings,” said Paul. “Teachers are trained in the structured conversation approach: they learn how to recap a conversation, summarise complex or convoluted points so that both sides understand, and set targets.

“This is an opportunity for a parent to bring to the table their own experiences of working with that child; their home life and interests. It gives us additional information.

“Targets are agreed for the pupil, home and school and then signed by both parties as a binding, year long contract.  This is followed up a few months later with a progress meeting to make sure that targets are being met and then at the end of that period of time there’s a celebratory meeting to review achievements and success.”

The initiative has had an impressive take-up. Over 80 per cent of parents of SEND pupils attend the structured conversations – over 10 per cent more than parent’s evening attendance - and the approach is now being applied to all parents at the school.

For assistant headteacher Catharine Jones and colleagues at Springbrook Special School in Oldham, the principles of the Achievement for All programme chimed with work they had already done. The big difference was that it helped them to bring together their existing efforts in a co-ordinated way.

“We were already working on ways to track individual pupil progress and make our provision personalised to meet the specific needs of each child,” she explained.

“Until AfA we were trying many different approaches to help our pupils close the learning gap and meet or exceed age related expectations for attainment and progress.  We found that we were already working according to the principles of AfA but that we were taking the different aspects of a child’s life in isolation.

“The programme helped us to plan our work in a much more co-ordinated way so that we analysed assessment data in line with parental engagement and a child’s access to wider opportunities.  As a school leader it was easier to identify where resources were needed and to prioritise school development actions.

“The fact that the principles of AfA backed up what the SLT in school planned gave us more confidence to go for it. The programme has also allowed us to distribute the leadership in school so that other staff members develop their skills in and out of the classroom.”

Sonia Blandford, founder and chief executive of the Achievement for All 3As charity, said effective school leadership was fundamental to the programme’s success.

“What characterised the leadership approach in schools implementing and developing Achievement for All was not the strong commitment of leaders to vision, but their proactive sharing of that vision with staff, parents and children in developing commitment across the school.”

Taking a whole school approach to the issue of inclusion for SEND and vulnerable pupils was another major ingredient in the programme’s effectiveness, she added.

“Other programmes and initiatives have tended to focus on single aspects of inclusion but with the national roll-out of the programme we’ve used evidence to develop leadership approaches that promote inclusiveness.

“The lynchpin is that leaders need a clear vision for all children, underpinned by commitment, collaboration and effective communication with parents and carers, children, teachers and leaders.”

Published November 2011