I originally wrote this in 2016 and never got around to finishing it and publishing it. Having read it, I think it still has relevance, and early intervention and action with vulnerable students and their parents/carers is still an essential part of helping those young people to succeed.
Rita Pierson
I was really taken with this video, it was shown to our whole staff at the beginning of the year. I found it really inspirational and made me reflect on my own teaching over the last 30 years and question whether I had always been a champion for children!
The other aspect of this that I found interesting was that it reflected discussions that some of us (teachers and support staff) were having about why our year 11 in the previous year had such positive attitudes to school reflected in; students turning up to revision sessions in unprecedented numbers and an almost complete absence of poor behaviour referrals. Groups of students that had potential to be difficult, and had lacked motivation, had poor attendance or poor behaviour for learning during year 9 had become more involved and happier learners by the time they got into Year 11.
This made me think about what work we had put in with these young people over time that had an impact!
Importantly it reflected how much we had been able to work with many of the young people on a very individual basis, central to that was getting them to feel valued and cared for by the school as well as by individual teachers, the school had invested in their belief in them but that the institution had invested believe in them.
One clear indicator of impact was that the school achieved 100% 5A* to G for the first time and in two of the three core subjects we had a significant increase to over 80% A* to C grades where nationally these subjects showed a decrease.
We carried out a relatively simple program where we paid for a number of students to go to the gym at lunchtime one of our brilliant young PE staff took them and made sure that they got the appropriate training in how to use the gym equipment. In return, the students were each paired with a year 7 reluctant reader and did 2 sessions of paired reading with the year 7 each week. We thought it was important for these young people to get the proper training to be able to confidently do the paired reading, and all of the identified year 11 students attended the training session. I wish I could say that this process was a smooth and faultless process, but it had logistical issues and took a while to get running smoothly, but everyone involved, including the students, agreed that it was worthwhile. It also had a benefit we had not considered in the planning that students had positives to write about in their college applications.
All of these young people went on to Sixth Form, college courses, or an apprenticeship.
Could we have identified these young people in year 7 or year 8? did they exhibit behaviours that would have flagged them up as a cause for concern? poor attendance? off task behaviour ? challenging behaviour? I think the answer is almost certainly yes.
Our KS2 to KS3 Transition work is really very good. The most vulnerable are identified with the primary schools early in the process. A lot of this work is undertaken by our excellent academic counsellors who work with the SENCO to organise all kinds of support groups, behaviour groups, peer friendship support, as well as the more obvious academic support for any student who as not met the KS2 4b threshold who will all be invited to summer school. All of these students (60 last year) are individually visited at their primary school. Students with statements or the new Education Health and Care Plan have the opportunity to be involved in a short film that is then shown to the whole staff where they talk about their expectations for Secondary School and what they hope to get from their teachers.
I am sure that our systems for dealing with vulnerable young people identified at that early stage are excellent, and we make sure that these young people are provided with support, genuine care, and educational challenges. So what about these young people who go on to be a problem in years 10 and 11? I suspect they are the young people who perhaps are more difficult to identify early on. These young people could come from the group who fail to thrive either because they haven’t really grasped what school is about or struggle with the move to a very big and complex organisation, they may not be seen as a problem as they tend to be quiet and not a formal cause for concern they just don’t commit to their work or life in school in the way that we would want from a successful learner although I suspect that by year 9 they are becoming difficult but never to a degree where they suffer sanctions they don’t hit the thresholds for attendance or behaviour but never the less are a concern.
These young people will generally get through KS3 without too much of a problem they may even be close to their minimum target grade but the quality of learning that they have experienced will have developed such poor learning behaviours that the step into GCSE with the expectations around classwork and homework become suddenly very difficult for them.
Slowly, the difficulty with work becomes a refusal to do work or work is completed to a standard well below the level they are expected to achieve and relationships with their classroom teachers become more challenging and time consuming. This breakdown in relationship with school is often in my experience mirrored by an increasingly difficult relationship with their parents, who question increasingly frequent contact from their child’s teacher complaining about lack of work and homework.
Sometimes, the relationship between the school and the parent/s becomes increasingly difficult as well because the parent doesn’t understand what has suddenly gone wrong with the school.
I am sure that many colleagues reading this (assuming someone does) will recognise the scenarios above and have a picture or the name of a child in their head who immediately springs to mind.
There are areas that we could develop further, and one of these is corporate parenting. For most teachers, the sight of young people having the commitment to go around talking to their teachers without their parents or another adult is both moving and frustrating. The fact that the young person sees the importance of the event and being represented at it is both fantastic and moving. The frustration emerges in that the parent or carer is not present. It may well be that there are really good reasons why the guardian might not be present, and this absence doesn’t reflect a lack of engagement with their child’s education, but too often, this is the case.
We have, of course, all the support processes to get parents involved, liaison workers, text messages, and home visits, but there are always those for whatever reason refuse. This has often left all concerned with the young person deeply worried about the support that they receive in the home and the impact of this in school.
It’s at this point that we need to take radical action in school and offer the young person a corporate parent another adult that the young person knows who will support their learning and progress. The best form tutors and heads of year will already be trying to fulfil this role, but too often, we are dependent on an individual response rather than a strategic and coordinated one.
We need to follow the example of some inner city project schools in Chicago where communities have been blighted by a lack of aspiration and role models, and this has been reflected in schools as well. To help combat this lack of aspiration and positive role models, every child has a nominated mentor who is there to support them throughout their school lives. The initial role of the mentor is to provide challenging aspirations as raising the aspirations of young people and their parents is seen as an essential first step to future educational success.