Youth Work & Residential Children's Care
The Home Office and the Department for Education have launched a consultation on reporting and acting on child abuse and neglect.
They are seeking views from the public on the possible introduction of a mandatory requirement for teachers and other professionals to report child abuse and neglect. Read the consultation documents and fill in the survey using the link above before the deadline on October 13th 12pm.
Two major children’s charities have launched a campaign urging employers, particularly those in the voluntary sector, to make more job opportunities available to young people without degrees.
The Open To All campaign, started by Children England and the National Children’s Bureau, aims to encourage more inclusive recruitment practices among employers so that candidates’ suitability for a role is judged on their skills and experience rather than whether they have a degree. It has been launched to counter the growing trend in the charity sector of entry-level positions being taken by graduates. Find out more on the Children England website.
The Children’s Society has produced their fourth Good Childhood Report, exploring how children feel about their lives, based on 10 years of well-being research in partnership with the University of York.
The report concludes that far too many children in England are experiencing low levels of well-being and considers what more can be done to improve the lives of children when it comes to their well-being, how to respond to those most in need and the importance of listening to children’s voices and understanding their personal experiences.
The report looks at the latest national statistics, key findings from the research programme, new findings from an international perspective and children’s well-being in the UK in comparison to that of children in other countries.
Key Findings;
The government has recently produced a report into child sexual exploitation entitled “It couldn’t happen here, could it?“.
The report evaluates the effectiveness of how local authorities’ have responded to the challenge of child sexual exploitation. The report draws on evidence from inspection and case examination in eight local authorities and from the views of children and young people, parents, carers, practitioners and managers. A number of other inspection reports of children’s homes and children’s services and reviews of Local Safeguarding Children Boards contributed to the findings.
If you’re a children’s or youth worker this is essential reading so go and download the report here.
Children and young people brought up by foster carers in England will be allowed to remain with families until they are 21 if they choose to under a new legal duty for councils – this is brilliant news – it was always crazy to force young people to live on their own at 18 by withdrawing their funding:
Children and young people brought up by foster carers in England will be allowed to remain with families until they are 21 if they choose to under a new legal duty for councils, ministers will announce on Wednesday.
Charities have long argued for a change in the law, which currently forces many young people to live on their own at 18. The government has set aside £40m for local authorities over the next three years to put support arrangements in place.
The decision marks a U-turn for ministers, who had previously resisted calls to expand Labour’s pilot Staying Put programme – a scheme that gives young people the option to stay with foster families until they are 21.
The Labour scheme had been piloted in 11 English local authorities since 2008 and evaluations showed that young people who stayed on with foster carers were twice as likely to be in full time education at 19 as those who did not.
Education minister Edward Timpson, whose own mother fostered 90 children, said: “I know from the many foster children I grew up with how crucial it is for them to be given sufficient time to prepare for life after care. A growing number of local authorities already offer young people the choice to stay, but with little financial support it can be challenging for their foster families. This is a further reform to our much wider package of support for care leavers, including much greater financial support for young people leaving care at 18.”
The government will now put forward an amendment at the third reading of the children and families bill in January.
Robert Tapsfield, chief executive of the Fostering Network, which campaigned on the issue, said: “This change in the law will make a massive difference to the lives of this and future generations of care leavers in England. This issue has, however, not been resolved for young people in Wales and Scotland. We will continue to campaign for this change in the law to be replicated”.
Currently, local authorities in England fund the cost of children in foster care until they reach 18. At that point, support varies across the country. In many areas, teenagers are forced to live by themselves at an age when others would remain at home. Statistics from the Department for Education revealed only 10 more young people stayed with their foster carers after the age of 18 in 2012-13 than in 2011-12.
Natasha Finlayson, chief executive of the Who Cares? Trust, which supports children in care, said: “This represents the most significant reform to the support children in care are given in a generation. Time and again we hear from young people who are extremely anxious about having to leave their carers when they turn 18 and effectively no longer having somewhere they can call home, especially when the average age for young people who aren’t in care to finally leave home is (at least) 24.”
The last session of the Hampshire County Council SEN Conference was entitled “Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants” and led by Rob Webster, Principal Special Needs Officer
Working in HCC since April 2013. Was at the Institute of Education in London before that.
Some aims:
Background
There is an assumption that TAs help raise pupil standards, but there had been little systematic research on impact over long-term and under everyday classroom conditions – there had been bits on literacy interventions etc. The Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project (2009) focussed on all support staff, especially TAs. This then led to the Effective Deployment of TAs (EDTA) in 2011.
Scale of the DISS project
Comparison of TA Support verses non TA Support within a classroom environment.
| Year | National Curriculum sub-level | ||
| English | Maths | Science | |
| 1 | -1.5 | -1 | |
| 2 | -1.5 | -1 | -1 |
| 3 | -2 | -2 | |
| 6 | -1 | -0.75 | -1 |
| 7 | -2 | -1.5 | |
| 9 | -1 | -0.75 | -1 |
| 10 | -1* | ||
Issues of
DISS: Which pupils do adults work with
| Interaction by pupil level of SEN | Teacher | TA |
| Non-SEN | 55% | 27% |
| School Action | 24% | 32% |
| School Action Plus or SEN statement | 21% | 41% |
TAs rarely worked with middle and higher attaining pupils. The higher the level of need, the more interaction with TAs and the less interaction the teachers.
Preparedness
Key messages from the research
Implications for practice
Rethinking the TA’s role
Effective Deployment of TAs Project
Conduct an audit
Decisions about deployment
What do you want the role and purpose of TAs to be? Teaching role and non-teaching roles (admin, SEAL, mobility, class organisation). This is a collaborative process of challenge and change – not about assessing how effective TAs are. The problem arise when TA role “drifts” from non-teaching towards teaching. 25% of the school workforce are currently TAs.
Key questions
TAs and Pupils with SEN
What OFSTED are looking for:
Quality of teaching – Inspectors must evaluate the use that is made of TAs.
The Teacher is responsible for progress and development of all pupils.
TAs and Interventions
When TAs lead interventions they often get positive outcomes. Why does this impact get lost in the terms of wider/annual attainment? There often seems to be the world of the Classroom and the world of the TA with the pupils having to make the link themselves. Teachers and TAs need to help them make sense of this. An interventions health check:
Making best use of TAs time
A third of the time teachers are just being part of the classroom audience – that raises questions around value for money. The TA repeats word-for-word the teachers instructions for a specific child, creating “stereo-teaching” – the child is now trying to listen to two voices instead of one.
Decisions about Practice
Set TAs free from unhelpful patterns of behaviour that underpin less effective types of talk:
Teachers use more open ended questions than TAs who used closed questioning. Need to reflect on forms of questioning that keep responsibility for learning with pupil. Pupils can become dependent on TA, they can almost not engage with work unless TA does the work for the pupil. Changing this helps to avoid spoon-feeding and pupils developing independence.
Key Findings
All the schools involved made widespread changes “no going back” to how things were. Teachers spent more time with pupils with SEN – a professional satisfaction.
Questions, Comments, Discussion
Further reading
Headlines from the world of education and schools work:
Headlines from the world of education and schools work:
Headlines from the world of education and schools work:
Headlines from the world of education and schools work:
Headlines from the world of education and schools work:
Headlines from the world of education and schools work:
Michael Gove condemns charities’ ‘don’t touch’ warning to teachers: The education secretary said telling teachers to avoid physical contact with students was ‘playing to a culture of fear’
GCSE league tables: thousands of pupils failing in key subjects: Up to 500,000 teenagers are leaving school without a decent grasp of traditional academic subjects, league tables show.
Head urges parents to apply for free meals: Parents who fail to claim for free school meals for their children, despite being eligible for them, are being urged by a secondary head to apply in order to boost school funding under the new pupil premium scheme announced last month.
The King’s Speech shines light on stammering: Just as The King’s Speech puts a spotlight on children who stammer, services to help them are being cut
‘70% would drop out’ if EMA is scrapped: Seven in 10 poor teenagers would drop out of school if controversial plans to scrap the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) go ahead, research suggests.
National curriculum review: compulsory subjects ‘could be axed’: Compulsory lessons in subjects such as citizenship, IT, music and design and technology could be axed under a sweeping review of the national curriculum.
Write it don’t type it if you want knowledge to stick: Children and students who write by hand learn better than those who type, a study shows.
Text messaging ‘improves children’s spelling skills’: Mobile phone text messaging can boost children’s spelling skills, according to new research.
Ofsted: white boys ‘held back by low expectations’: White working-class boys are falling behind their classmates after being let down by unambitious teachers, according to the education watchdog.
Mayor caught speeding by local schoolchildren: The Mayor of Doncaster has been caught speeding by children in a police road-safety exercise.
Religion must be in key school exam, insist faith leaders: Bishop of Oxford says anti-Islam protests make the subject essential for the English baccalaureate. Religious leaders and theologians have condemned the decision to leave religious education off the list of GCSEs that go towards the controversial new English baccalaureate.
Coalition seeks to introduce post-exam university admissions: Can the coalition succeed where Labour failed, to make university admissions follow A-level results?
The Children’s Manifesto of 2001: This is what the school children of Britain wanted back in 2001
Unruly behaviour in schools ’caused by boring lessons’: Boring lessons are fuelling bad behaviour in the classroom as unruly children “muck about” to kill time, MPs warned.
Writers speak up over plans to close 450 libraries: Protests against the planned closure of more than 450 library services were staged today. Library users, authors, parents and children took part in “read-ins” and demonstrations at libraries in South Yorkshire, Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Dorset and in Oxfordshire, where 20 of the 43 libraries still running are earmarked for withdrawal of funds.