Autonomy brings unexpected results
"Joined-up thinking" and "partnership working" are the new buzz phrases in the education world. Schools are no longer seen primarily as individual entities delivering the curriculum on-site to their pupils. Instead, school leaders are now being encouraged to form partnerships with other schools, learning providers and local authorities to pool knowledge, ideas, existing resources and available funding, with the shared aim of improving outcomes for children and young people.
The impetus has come from a change in government thinking. Rather than school support coming directly from the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), the white paper, Your Child, Your Schools, Our Future: Building a 21st-Century Schools System, makes it clear that responsibility for school improvement is being handed back to schools, and will increasingly be driven by locally identified needs.
This can be as simple as schools supporting other schools to improve. At a deeper level, this approach sees headteachers as part of a much wider partnership of service providers, including children's services, youth services, drug and alcohol support and voluntary sector service providers.
Establishing local "clusters" of schools is one way of doing this. Clusters differ to federations of schools (where schools are joined together under a single governing body) in that they are usually co-ordinated by local authorities.
Birmingham city council has already organised its schools into clusters. Alison Selvey, one of its extended schools coordinators, explains how it works. "I have 11 schools in my cluster and the settings go from nursery to 18. We look at the provision that already exists, and then heads' forums come together with their data and look at the needs. Each cluster has a steering group, which includes [representatives from the] police, youth services, probation and health services."
Multi-agency consultation means that gaps in provision are identified early, needs are discussed and co-ordinated, and services can be put in place to target children who need a particular kind of support.
In Nottinghamshire, in a similar model to school clusters, joint access teams (JATs) are arranged around "families of schools." Each JAT has a different set of core members depending on locally identified needs, says ICT Systems manager Andy Curzon, of Foxwood Foundation school and technology college.
In Foxwood's JAT, alongside primary and secondary schools sit a variety of local authority departments including social care, health, police, educational psychology, emotional health and wellbeing, inclusion support and behaviour support teams, family specialist practitioners, the children's centre and extended services.
Co-ordinated by the county council, a key principle behind the JATs is to bring together services that may be individually working with families and young people so that resources are deployed more effectively. They also aim to increase the knowledge that all services hold on families in need of support, so problems can be dealt with earlier and without duplication.
Prevention is a focus of Selvey's extended schools work in Birmingham too. Commissioning as a cluster of 11 means that getting crucial preventative services to the right children can now be done in a much more focused way.
The move towards partnership working is recognition that improving educational outcomes for children and young people is not just about what they do at school and that a more holistic approach is needed.
Revised guidance published last November has raised the bar for children's trust partners who now have much greater responsibility for achieving measurable improvements in the lives of children and young people they work with.
Building up schools' capacity as commissioners is crucial in delivering the government's vision as detailed in the white paper, empowering schools to choose the improvement support they need and the right services to meet the needs of pupils and parents more effectively.
The proposed pupil guarantee sets out new entitlements for personalised support for every pupil, a government aim which is now being realised in the provision of personalised catch-up support for pupils who have fallen behind in primary school. This is matched by the parent guarantee, which sets out the government commitment to making sure all children go to a schoolwhere they are encouraged to have high aspirations and achieve their potential.
In Birmingham, a cluster of schools has been working together to address the isolation experienced by families of children who attend special schools in the area. At Selly Oak Trust school, which caters for children with learning difficulties, parents were linked with other families from schools across the cluster.
So what are the challenges of commissioning in this way? "Well, schools with their own agendas are heavily focused on what they have to deliver," says Selvey. "But children spend 15% of their time in school, so that means 85% is out of school, and we've shown how some of that 85% can be used productively in extended services to help them meet their targets."
Partnerships can also open up new possibilities. From a school perspective, says Selly Oak Trust deputy head Malcolm Pomeroy, "being in a cluster has stopped us thinking 'what's in it for us?' and changed it to 'what's in it for the cluster?'"