Adela Kay, Assistant Headteacher at Aspire Virtual School, has conducted in-depth research on a variety of pressing issues affecting children and young people within our community.
For May’s research, Adela explores key topics such as well- being during exam season, smart phone use, elective home education, children’s and families interventions, education policy, children and violence, attendance, exclusions and crime. Below, you’ll find summaries and links to valuable resources aimed at supporting schools in these areas.
Well-being during Exam Season
In the Virtual School we have been thinking a lot about how we can support our vulnerable children during the statutory exam period. We know that year 11 and 13 can be a particularly stressful time for young people and for our young people who already have other ACEs and Trauma this can be one thing to many to deal with. This article from Childline highlights the increase in traffic to their help lines.
It also gives advice for young people and parents. One of the things we have been thinking about in the virtual school has been that naming the anxiety and acknowledging and normalising the fact that exams are stressful being quite important. It may make it more manageable if they know they are not the only ones, but also reminding them that life beyond exams does exist and give them good things to look forward to in July and August.
📌 Find out more here: Rise in calls to Childline about exam and revision stress during the exam period last year | NSPCC
Smart Phone Use
Everyone will be aware of the growing concern around smart phone use amongst young and even very young children. The children’s commission has written finding around school phone policies and calls on the government to provide support for headteachers in creating robust policies around phone use in school.
📌 Find out more here: School phone policies in England: Findings from the Children’s Commissioner’s School and College Survey | Children’s Commissioner for England
Elective Home Education/EOTAS
This article is interesting in the light of the new changes to the law around Elective Home Education as it focusses on the HR needs in local authorities to meet the demands of the new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. I listened yesterday to some legal analysis around the implications for parents and LAs of the bill and there are a number of points of law which are significant changes to what we have currently. However as a quote in this article articulates all too clearly lack of visibility for some of these children can lead to significant safeguarding concerns, unfortunately also brought into sharp relief by the death of Sara Sharif. My observation would be that change in the law is needed but needs to be robust enough and nimble enough that LAs can manage cases quickly to make material differences to children’s educational experiences, whilst also being clear for parents. Local Authorities will need to have enough staff in place to support this work
📌 Find out more here: Safeguarding reforms at risk as research highlights significant strain on home education staff of local authorities | NSPCC
Children’s and Families Interventions
Foundations have published a guidebook a little like the EEF macro analysis of different interventions but for children’s and families work. It looks quite interesting and has all sorts of suggested interventions which are designed to help families and their children. Each different intervention is given an evidence rating and a cost rating and the better the evidence to cost ration the higher up the interventions come. There are a number of interventions designed to prevent crime and anti-social behaviour.
📌 Read the guide here: About the Guidebook – Foundations
Education Policy, Children and Violence
The Youth Endowment Fund have written a report summarising the evidence from over 30 approaches to prevent children’s involvement in violence. This guidance incorporate and evaluates primary research and large scale studies and makes recommendations for school leaders and local authorities. It is a really comprehensive report and makes a number of recommendations, some of which, in the current financial climate, I think are unrealistic if I am honest, but others of which I think schools should really consider. I was particularly interested in their focus on violence against women and girls (VAWG) which I think we are sadly seeing a rise in in the 21st century. I think that if we can combat this from an education point of view, we will not only being doing women/girls a service but also hopefully improving outcomes for boys and men to have more positive and healthy relationships throughout their lives. The recommendations for this report can be found below along with podcasts discussing the findings.
📌 Read the report: Education Policy, Children and Violence | Youth Endowment Fund
Attendance , Exclusions and Crime
This document looks at the link between poor attendance and low socio-economic background, and how this can impact their outcomes at KS4. This builds on articles regarding the Children with a Social Worker cohort which highlights the link between poor attendance in the cohort, high levels of suspension and exclusion and poor outcomes. This article is slightly different because it particularly looks at children who had originally high outcomes but declined over their school life. I thought the gap in attendance between low SES and high SES was particularly notable and I think requires further thought on how to combat low attendance.
📌 Watch the film & read the campaign: School absences, exclusions and crime amongst high-achieving children from disadvantaged backgrounds – FFT Education Datalab
Best wishes,
Adela
