 Hello and welcome to Pookie Pondas, the podcast where I explore big questions with brilliant people. Today's question is, how can we ensure children are happy, safe and engaged? And I'm in conversation with Paul Hodgkinson. Okay, thank you. My name is Paul Hodgkinson. I'm up in Bolton. I'm the executive principal of the Bolton Impact Trust, which is a multi-academy trust comprising four AP academies and also an SEMH, Special School Academy. A little bit about myself, I taught PE and maths in a pru up from 1997, so this is my 24th, 25th year now in AP. My first headship was in 2005 of one of the big pruers in Bolton. In 2010 I was invited to head up the Federation of Four Pupor Referral Units in Bolton and I did that for six years. In 2014 we were asked to support a school that was in quite challenging circumstances. It had just gone into special measures, there were some significant difficulties up there in terms of children's behaviour, in terms of processes. So we went in there in 2014. In 2016 we were asked whether or not we would take it into our organisation, but in order to do that we had to or we converted to become the Bolton Impact Trust. So they became part of our organisation in 2016. I'm an existing board member of the National AP Pru Organisation Pru's app. I've been involved in 50 plus school-to-school support assignments, usually in AP and in special schools, but we also transferred some of our processes in our footprint, our blueprint rather, into the mainstream sector. My schools, my academies have been judged eight times outstanding by Ofsted, which we're very proud of. There's been many times where I've not been judged outstanding also, but we're very proud of, we think we've found a formula for what constitutes decent provision for children who may be struggling to access mainstream education. So my whole career has been spent in AP and special, but we love sharing ideas around best practice and next practice. We also love sharing and sort of receiving new ideas from colleagues as well. Fantastic. And the episode question today where we'll jump off, but it sounds like there's loads of different directions we might go, is how can we ensure children are happy, safe and engaged? So would you mind making a start on this massive question, Paul? Yeah, we can start before COVID, I think. One of the things that we were really clear about in 2017, a report came out, which I think it came out from the difference, and it was an excellent report around alternative provision, and it really began to, we began to poke us a little bit in terms of, there was a question in there around, do we really understand what success looks like in alternative provision? And I think you can probably transfer this into the mainstream sector as well. When we went away, we really thought about the question that was posed, and we really wanted to understand in our world, in our environments, what does success actually look like? And we came up with an idea around what outcomes are good outcomes for children in AP and special schools, and we came up with two concepts, the idea of phase one outcomes and phase two outcomes. I think that phase one outcomes are important to a really critical part of our work and they measure those pastoral indicators. We collect evidence and we analyse evidence around things like engagement, attendance, resilience, social ability, behaviour, mental wellbeing, quality of life, experiencing success and failure, making friends, trying new things, that sort of thing, and that's really, really important. And we think that that's in terms of the link to what we would call traditional outcomes as well. And that's our phase two outcomes, which relate to vocational progress, academic progress attainments and post-16 destinations, et cetera. So when we read the report and we digested the report, we decided that a lot of the stuff that we do would be around phase one and phase two outcomes, and actually it tied in quite well with the New Austin framework where there was no surreal emphasis on personal development, as well as the behaviour and attitude stuff. So we built our whole processes and our whole systems now around children experiencing success and failure in both phase one and phase two. And I think when we do our school-to-school support work, one of the things that we see in schools in challenging circumstances is that they've not quite got the curricular baltright, particularly in terms of SEMH, because often they're really ambitious with their curriculum around maths and English and science and history and geography in French and Spanish, and all those really important things. But actually there's not enough time dedicated to those really important things around the phase one stuff that I talk about. And I think that a number of provision that we quite recently would admit that they've fallen into is that those things like social communication, those things like contributing to the community, those things like, as I say, sharing experience and success and failure and stuff like that, resilience, engagement, they're not quite, there's not enough time designated to them. We've built some processes now where we're able to say, you know what, our children get a really decent package where we look after the phase one, we look after the phase two. And actually, if phase one is done really well, phase two naturally can follow, provide teaching learning is good and pedagogy and stuff like that. But equally, if pedagogy is done really well and teaching and learning is done really well, we believe that that has a flip in the narrative, that has a really important knock-on effect on the things that we talk about at phase one. If we get phase one right and if we get phase two right, we believe that our children will be engaged, will be happy, will be safe. Now, we then had to make some decisions around lockdown and around COVID. We received the guidance from the government. It was sometimes a little bit hard to understand. We didn't quite understand what it was asking us to do, particularly in alternative provision. So we made a decision. We made a decision with my leadership team and then we spoke to Sarah and the guys at Prousap. And we said, how can we ensure that when our children aren't with us or when some of our children aren't with us, that they actually remain safe, remain happy, remain engaged? So we created a process, if you want to call it that, of seven key questions. And through developing a checklist and some lines of inquiry, we satisfied ourselves that if we could answer yes to each of these questions, then we could pretty much ensure that our children fell into the safe, happy and engaged brackets. The questions that we looked at, we put the guidance to one side because the guidance clearly stated, at first the guidance stated that all children who were classed as vulnerable, APS special, should come into school. We had to balance this up with trying to manage a really nasty virus, a global pandemic. So we decided to then analyse which of our children would best be suited to come into school and which would best be able to stay at home because many of our families has lovely infrastructure. They did magnificently during the first lockdown, the children really fell. Particularly some of the children you may have expected to do, children with mental health issues, et cetera, et cetera, because some of their anxieties came from actually attending school. We then decided to. We created the priority list first and foremost. So we've got priority one, priority two, priority three. Children on priority one are the children that we felt were safer in school. And when we look at priority, we look to things like crime, drug gangs, their own mental health, the home life for them, the safety nets at home. We also took child protection status and things like that. And also we went with some of our own hunches and looked at some of our own intelligence. All priority one children come into school. Or come into our settings. And then priority two children, they get a daily visit and a daily contact. And priority three children, they get a twice weekly contact visit, et cetera, and remote learning, live learning kicks in. We'd got the priority one children in, but we needed to be clear that the priority two and priority three children remained safe, happy and engaged. So these are the seven questions we decided on. Has every child been offered what is appropriate for them from using our own intelligence? So can they learn appropriate at home? Are they safe at home? Is there any mitigating, and then any factors that might not make them safe or happy? And if they're happy, if we're happy for them to stay at home, we can teach them at home. If not, they can come in. Are parents and carers in agreement with each decision? So we constructed some questions and some processes to work with every single parent of our 250 children to understand that they were happy with what we were doing at that time. And the packages that were designed would work for those, for their children. Is every child safeguarded? And I can go into that a little bit more in a minute. Is the curriculum of a high quality every day, not only content, but also delivery and impact? We brought the three eyes into it. Are we regularly reviewing the priority list? We have some children, one we could be priority two, then between the priority three, things happen in the last priority one. So are we regularly doing that across the five settings? Are staff contributing equally? This was an important one. When we presented this in the past, people have said to us, is this a test that all staff are really working hard and they're not skyping or they're not having the afternoon's off? We didn't create the question for that. We created the question because some of our CEV staff in the first lockdown, they felt really left out and they felt like they weren't contributing and they wanted to contribute. So what we actually did with our CEV staff, we managed to create or to ensure that they had, were that they could contribute just as equally as the staff who were on site or the staff who weren't CEV. So that's the reason why we did that. And then the final part for us was communication with parents, trustees, governors and commissioners. Is it strong enough? And I think there were the seven questions. It received quite a lot of positivity in terms of this is very pragmatic. It's very sensible. It's certainly not sophisticated. It's just a very simple way of analysing. And if we can get yes to each of those seven questions, then I think we wouldn't be far off ensuring that our children will serve happy and engaged. And I guess getting to yes is a challenge with some of those questions and I'm really interested to pick some of them in part. Up towards the top of the list there was about working with parents and carers being in agreement with each decision. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about why that felt so important. Yeah, we are. We're collaborative and we do work well with the parents. We recognise that the parents were... It was a tough time for them as well. We were making some really big decisions in terms of schooling, in terms of safeguarding and we wanted to get the parents on board. We felt it was important that we weren't doing it to them. We were doing it with them. We agreed on that. We generally work like that anyway. We do a lot of work with our parent groups. We have a lot of support networks for our parents. We have therapists ready to work with our parents if they're struggling. So we have this sort of relationship going on with them anyway. What we decided to do, between myself and my vice principal, every Thursday we picked a group of parents and gave them a lot of information. We created a set of questions. Very simple questions. This was across all the six... We've got five of them across the six sections. We asked a set of questions. What does your child's offer currently look like? We talked to them about that. We asked them whether it was decided in partnership with them. We asked them were they happy with the offer? ac ar y cwrin gyda'r ffordd, dyfodod am neud i chi i dweud roedd yn ddweud yn ei wneud? Ac ei joiner o gyllid i'ch ddiddorol i chi amser despol? A they were the six standard questions that we asked every Thursday to our random group of parents through which we put out the registers etc etc. We then created a grid of answers and if any of the answers we flagged was read that we think we can be done a little bit more or it could be done a little bit better or we need to push it a little bit more we then go back to the academy teams ac yn effeithio yng Nghymru. Yn raddwch i gynnwysion, yma, rwy'n ddweud yng nghyrch yn ganddai'r ysgwrt. Yn gyflaenol, felly'n gwybod am y Llyfrgellol o'r Sfysgol Specialysgol, mae'r ddweud yn ysgwrt o'r Ms Wittle Callum Môn. Mae'n ffamil i gael a'r llwch, mae'n fawr i'r ffordd yn gwych. Mae'n ffordd ei ffordd i'w mewn ymddangos. Mae'n ddweud o'r gwirioneddol ar rôl. Ie ddwy'r ddorol. Rydyn ni'n gweithio fe ddweud itwun hwnnw ac yn gweithio'r ddweud. E'n dweud i'n edrychwch yn fath o homo. Mae'r dŵud yn gar shout o'u gilydd. Felly yn gweithio a'r dŵud, ac mae'n rhai'r gweithio, mae'n gallu'n gweithio a'i meddwl i'r mecanicio, a chael cais eich meddwl i'r mecanicio a wedi bod nhw yma'r gweithio. Mae boardau y ffocasio chi'n adreffu a'i gweithio I'r bobl yn eich cyfaint o'r gwirio a'i ganddillon nhw i'n gyd-dyn nhw'n ei wneud, i'r bobl yn eich tynt yn dweud gael cyhoeddau. Gweithio'r bobl yn ei wneud, mae'n rhan i chi'n gwybod – mae'n ganddillon nhw yn cael eu promysau. Mae'n ddiddordeb yng nghymchi sy'n gweithio'r bobl yn ymgylch chi'n gweithio'r Mae'n gweithio'r bobl yn eich cyfaint. Ond we had some examples, we were phoned up and the children weren't doing particularly well at home, so we moved them at the priority list and we brought them in. There was a lot of stuff around the children, on the vocational packages, the BTEC packages, we dropped bricks and mortar and all sorts off of them to do it at home, but it wasn't quite the same so we brought quite a few of those children in. And actually, when we spoke to the parents, we made a lot of changes, we listened to them and they were brilliant in that so they helped us to design the things that we didn't do. prefiwn i'r holl. Ieitho fyddechrau sy'n ei chaf, Oni'n rhoi i chi i wneud i'r llwyddon haf. Fy tynnu'r llwyddon o'r rhaniau, ond mae'n gladeg ac rhai'r hyn o'r hynioniau of Brixton Mawr o'r llwyddon. Felly mae'r cyaffredd eich môn, ac mae'r siŵr hyffordd yn chwarae. Mae trofyn wren i'r ddechrau achos hwnnw i'r gynhyrchu nesaf, a mae'n eich sefydlau eu wneud i'r llwyddon nhw. Felly mae'n gofio i chi i'r llwyddon. Ma plugged ond, ond, a we tried to recreate it. You can't recreate everything. As we've unlocked a little bit, a lot more of our vocational children have come in to do that sort of thing, because obviously we wanted to make sure that they could still access it, a lot of our children have loved the vocational stuff. And that was how we worked with parents. And our parents are great. They let us know, they do let us know, and we quite like that. Yn ystod, os ydych chi'n debygu y llunion o'r ddau hynny, ond yw'r ddau cyfnodol yn dod yn credu'r beth. Mae'r ddau'r cyfarwydd yn ysgrifennu bydd y maes perthigol yn ei gennym gynnwys. Ynna'n dweud i'n gwirionedd hynny o fod yn ysgrifennu'r ddau'r llunion? Pan yw'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau'r ddau? So we can have obviously designated safeguarding leads in each of the academy settings. Maish propre principle, she leads safeguarding for the for the trust. We agreed early on the priority list system. We ran it through the DFA, the DFA liked it. I think it took it's the ministerial team was really simplistic way of doing things. And basically every single one of my children in all of our settings was graded in one of the priority list, as I say, in many of the children. We know a lot about them. a we've got intimate relationships with their families and with the agencies who they work with, and it was very easy for us to prioritise the children to those three lists. One of the things that we were really keen on, we worked with Amy Smith, then in Surrey, then at Wight College, and they introduced these eyes on system where you could safely, during the first lockdown, when everything was shut down really, you could safely go knock on set back, and we had a number of children across the organiser, across Heart Trust, a dweud hynny. Mae'r cyfnodd wedi'u gweled i'r cyfnodd sylwydau'r cysilyddol a ni'n gweld i'r cyfnodd sylwydau ar yr adnodd cyfnodd sy'n gweld i'r cyfnodd ar ôl yma yma. Yna'r cyfnodd, yr adnodd, yma'r cyfnodd yn cael ei wneud, er mwyn yna ddim yn ei wneud, ac mae'r cyfnodd yn cyfnodd yma, gweld i'r adnodd ymgyrraedd yma'n gwhechau. Y cwestiwn ymddangos di'wch yn mewn amddangos gyda y gymdeithasol yn yr oeddechrau. Rydyn ni'n dda i'r rai trafodur yn adroddol arfer â'r dar地 o gyllid eich ei glwyl? Rydyn ni'n adroddol arfer? Rydyn ni'n adroddol ar yr adroddol ar altragin? Kei'r gwneud hynny a'r gwneud y ddodol? Kei'r gwneud y log ac rydych chi? Ac mae gennym yn meddwl y ffordd ac ei wneud? Mae'n adroddol ar gyfer ar yr adroddol? Rydyn ni'n adroddol ar gyfer y mae'r argylcheddol? felly zones of training going on at the same time. What the whole visits look like in the eyes on processes. What the process is in place if you're unable to contact a pupil. How often do you update social workers on specific pupils? And what's the pupil well being offered? We then build upon how it links with the agencies, whether it? It's social work teams, whether it's the local lab team or the youth offending team, the police, the local police a'r llwyddon a'r srif, felly rym ni wedi gweld bod yr rôl yn ei wneud cyfnodol, rym ni wedi gweld bod yn llwyddon o feithio'r llwyddon ymlaen. A yw'r cyfnodd, fel rydym yn meddwl, yw'r cyfnodd, mae'n meddwl i'w cwestiynau i'r cyfnodd. Rydyn ni'n meddwl i'w cyfnodd, felly roedden nhw'n meddwl i'w cyfnodd, felly roedden yn ei wneud. Felly, os allwch, mae'n meddwl hynna, nid am hyn yn criadio. Felly, nid o'r rhaid ffledig o'r rhaid, ond byn yn ei sgrifenio yn ddeunyddol, ac nid o'r rhaid ffordd bod ni wedi'r wneud o'r defnyddio'r marshmallow yn rhaid, nad yna'r fedri ei chyfyddiadau a'r lle, oherwydd ein ffromwg. Asgolwch maen nhw wedi hen, nad yna maen nhw ffordd fel yw'r hynny'n arddugoddau. gadewch a'r flwyddog yn digwydd ddim yn credu ar gyfer hyn. Mae'n hynny'n cael ei fod i'w g strawberries, i edrych gennym y ddechrau ddyddiannol, a rydyn ni'n meddwl llawer o siaradau gwpayers, a rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r cyffredinol i fynd i'ch gwrth dim yn llawer o'r yma. Efallai. A dy分 i'n meddwl gael ddau'n mynd i'w rhaid o'r cyfwyr o'n mynd i ff Idiol. LOOW expected is to show them, the safeguarding of every child, but actually that became significantly more challenging more challenging, didn't it. RO�� rwy'b propagandr an tramp hanigaid. I think it became easier as we got better, with things like online learning, and we used our team stuff and all that. And we got the technology into the homes and stuff. It became it was very raw at the start, it was very crewed at the start, we were literally getting in the mill involves knocking on the door stepping back, we were dropping food parcels, we were doing things like someone was an example, one of my staff who works on Preston which is like 45 minutes away. It was one of her guys, one of her boys on her case Lord, it was his birthday and she drove from Preston to Bolton 대� relax on the door, put his car in his present on the path, got back in the car and drove off and first it was as if the internet hadn't even been invented and it was brilliant because we saw loads of absolutely unbelievable practice going on and we saw loads of the staff going over and above more than they do normally. When we got the technology sorted and when we got the it was easier for us to to teach with the Google classroom stuff was fantastic and other stuff that we used as well but I think then it helped with safeguarding practices, communication, eyes on stuff and all that and like I said we always always kept them pro to one children right at the forefront of our mind particularly in terms of safeguarding. Absolutely and you mentioned before we started recording that there's been a bit of a change in the profile of behaviour in your area and there's been sort of raising things like knife crime and stuff is that something you're happy to talk a little bit about? Yeah it was interesting we we'd Bolton is a happy little town and we we we've never seen some of these big city behaviours before and and what we we saw an emergence of was a new levels of children carrying knives which in a couple of incidents quite high profile incidents where knives had been used and this wasn't behaviour that we'd seen before. We've done a piece of work here at the impact trust around maybe some of the the early indicators of why that might happen it looked like some of the children who were involved we knew some of the children who were involved had during a lot of their spent time still out on the streets we'd seen the emergence of a number of different facets or gangs in the town from different geographical areas we'd seen an increase certainly in street robbery and stuff like that so yeah we did see that we've also since we've come back to to school we've seen an increase in the number of children who've been referred to us after permanent exclusion and and weapons have been cited as reasons for exclusion as well so Bolton acted really decisively and really quickly there's now a strategy group which is headed up by the local authority we're involved in that we we have representatives on that because we think that we know down on the ground what the triggers might be who's involved we've done a profiling of all of our children and the ones who seem to be involved in the knives there's a consistent message coming out that they're in different they're in certain parts of the town they're into different they're into certain styles of music they dress in a certain way they might have seen some domestic violence in the past so we've now got a like a quite a clear picture of who the children are we might next get involved so we're working with professionals to try and jump in and go upstream before they all dive into the deep end with that so yeah but it's it's been a new thing at like I say I've worked in special education in Bolton for coming up to 25 years and Bolton is at a town that's seen much of this and it just seems to have increased in the last three or four months but I must say that that the local authority and the police and the agencies have acted really quickly want to understand why and to try and mitigate the risks but yeah there's been some new behaviours emerged certainly. Is that something that you've heard from colleagues elsewhere in the country has there been you know these kind of big city behaviours evolving elsewhere or yeah yeah I have a colleague up in Lancashire who now she's running a special school and they have they have an arch a knife arch you know the with the detectors on and that that's 20 miles away so yeah I have a colleague Steve Howell in Birmingham and some of our colleagues down in London who they've seen these behaviours for a while they have really good link with the violence reduction units and really good link with the police and other agencies and stuff but we'd sort of sat back and listened to them in absolute awe because we just hadn't seen we're quite new to it really and we've had some really tough lads through over the years but never quite got to that and we saw the signs probably just after Christmas in Bolton that these new behaviours arriving and like I said we've had to act quite quickly of course as well speaking to colleagues from when the national picture saw people like Steve and stuff we've been really advisory in their advice to us around how we best go about it but but Bolton's really on to this now and I'm hoping that we can we can we can put a bit of a stop to it because it is quite worrying we we're seeing younger children years years seven with knives in school and stuff and we've tried to understand as well with the knife thing in Bolton and we've tried to understand certainly you know is it what are the reasons why why is this happening and then which groups are most likely and then see if we can we can get some education in before it happens and I think that's the piece of work to go down at the moment it sounds like you're practising all those things that we still often talk about a kind of you know around sort of curiosity and empathy and really beginning to explore what what's this behaviour kind of telling us and what's the need here rather than going straight in with that sort of punitive response presumably that's kind of a very much the way that you you work generally then or we do we we empathy is interesting for us we we've tried to over the last few years we've changed our recruitment strategy here certainly where in the past we we put adverts out for jobs and we we brought in candidates of a certain outlook but we've changed our recruitment strategy in the last three or four years and we've really looked now in the for the teachers we've really looked at them with who've got mainstream pedigree and now pedigree knows around things like pedagogy teacher and implementation impact all that sort of stuff in terms of our support staff now we've gone more for experts by experience or lived experience so we have ex pupils who teach here now who have been working with me for three or four years um we have one example one of my learning mentors he's extremely talented he's very impactful in his work he was a student of hours 10 years ago he'd seen a lot at a very young age he came towards and he turned his life around really he then went out to he became a bricklayer he then became a consistency surveyor and then three or four years ago he came and said me he said I'd love to give something back so he we appointed him he's an incredible member of staff now he knows more about what's going on than I ever would or ever could he's an expert and he's and he's lived it so we're really encouraging this now some of the guys who we were with there's an organisation in bone call wise up these these are guys who've got lived experience we utilise them more and more so our recruitment strategy and and who we use now um it's really important so the knife crying thing kicks off and we have a boy who came to us six or seven years ago he's not a boy anymore but he came to us six or seven years ago he got involved in the gangs he got shot um that sort of thing in Manchester um he came and saw me the other week he's very articulate he's very changed he's a very sort of inspiring chap now he's going to come and do some work and he's going to come and work with the boy so so that expert by experience thing is really important for us and if you look at my team now I've got 130 in my team and it's a real mixture and I have guys who've been inside guys who've been in the army guys who are ex-students I've got um female staff who've been debt collectors I've got some who've been homeless um I've got some from the traveler background I've got boxing champions so we've got a real mix of people who've seen a bit done a bit lived it to understand where our children are I think that's really important so I think our recruitment strategy has been really really important in getting the right people in positions to work with our children and it's hugely impactful and presumably they act as really important role models for your children as well because they can see here's someone who maybe has got some similarities to myself and look well you know the live case studies aren't they and you look at the lad who works with me now Troy and like I say he's seen a lot at 15 he got moved out of a really big city because of some problems that he was involved in um and he can tell a story and he tells a real story but he is also he's a family man he's got a great job he drives a lovely car he's a very caring chap he's still extremely sort of the guys here the children here hold him in real high esteem because he's still cool he's far cooler than I am um and he's very very he's a message from Troy or a message from me you know there's not there's no comparison and he is a real live working example and we've just got a girl came and saw me Sophie it was a girl who was here last year her college placement has finished now and she's got some spare time she's going to come and work in the summer term working teaching um some of the hair and beauty stuff with Kelly my hair and beauty teacher Sophie is a she's really turned her life around and she's a remarkable example of a successful child she was in a really poor place to have her over the summer term I think we're really lucky because I think our girls will look up to her um she's another live case to be so we're dead into that and we like that so yeah Sophie will join us after Easter and she's 17 18 year old and she'll be doing some teaching and the girls will listen to her because she's got that credibility and she's not learnt it from a textbook she's lived it and seen it and done it and you know there's no there's no substitute for that I don't think and what a testament to the environment that you've created to that uh young people who I'm sure in many cases were not necessarily loving attending school before they came to you actually choose to come back and give something back there yeah what's your advice to um other settings and I'm thinking particularly about mainstream here who who might be really struggling with children who are finding it difficult to attend right now so we've seen like I'm getting reported a huge uptick in school based anxiety um and avoidance and children who found it really difficult to return and I've got a live case study at home um after the the last lockdown I mean this is stuff you've done forever right you've had children who've been uh struggling to attend and and you've had to integrate after long periods of absence from school what have you learned that you can you can share with colleagues there yeah it's really simple I think the answer is probably shorter than it should be but we created we have two provision where children um we have our provision called a park school which is for children who either come from tier four um um you know um secure unit type thing they've got suicidal ideation um really high anxiety um etc depression stress type illnesses and we have our personal learning centre where children have been out of school sometimes for six months or more um and we found out quite both of those provision are really high quality provision one of the key things we've got to do if we go back to the phase one stuff we've got to first get them to attend then we've got them to engage and we've got to get them working independently and they're like the three key things that we do I think that if we'll take Ryan as an example Ryan was a boy who was in school um he started with us in September his last day in mainstream school was at the end of febru of the same year so we've been out from February so he'd have the Easter holders the summer holders and all that school time that he'd missed we recognised that if we'd have brought Ryan in straight away it would have but he would have defeated the objects he wouldn't have engaged because he had a very negative experience of school he had a very negative perception of school so what we did with him we created a process a number of years ago that we called graded exposure and what we basically did is that we we designed packages to build children up very slowly and sometimes the less is more philosophy works really well we allocated Ryan if we use Ryan as an example one of the the male members of staff done at the personal learning centre um he he knocked on he took him for a coffee he understood that he really was interested in golf um so he used to take him to the driving range and gradually he would build up his contact time and this was over a period of our design stage for our curriculum is anything between four and six weeks so in that four to six week period um we we do a lot of the sorts of the pastoral the relationship type stuff then we introduced some small elements of some maybe academic testing or some some social profiling stuff then we gradually build up to maybe some time in centre and then we'd go to maybe mornings or a couple of full days then hopefully by week six we can begin to bring them in right Ryan's 100% a tender in centre now and I think we have many examples the graded exposure philosophy or methodology has served us really really well we did we took we took note of you know I think it was um Mary Carp into Oxford Brookes who did the stuff around the recovery curriculum you know you can't underestimate this idea that you know social settings mixing with peer groups allowing that to happen slowly and gradually was really important to us um sometimes educating children the art of being educated is but that has to be done really slowly we have to reopen their minds to learning and to social environments so the gradual graded done again with with the child or with the parents has been really important so yeah the graded exposure stuff is stuff we don't put too much pressure on we we understand about children's windows of tolerance we understand about that work and we understand that you know the success that we've achieved with our children over the years is because we've reduced anxiety for them in the classroom but also excited the classroom um if if we can you know if you're understanding we've got to try and keep the children within that window of tolerance through positive source interaction by not putting too much pressure on them to eliminating that thing where they might fight or fly and and that's really important to us so every child has a different tolerance level and we just have to understand where they are and then we can build our provision around them so so we do think about it quite a lot yeah and do you ever have children that you feel unable to to kind of meet the needs of or have you been able to always adapt and change to to work with every child there's not been many over the years i don't think i think there's we've always been able to adapt i think we've got the flexibility we have a commissioner in Bolton who are really understanding of you know if we can't do it there must be something you know significantly not quite right here so they allow us the flexibility to some children will be as we've seen during the lockdown very comfortable working from home some children will be very comfortable because they're so anxious they might do a two o'clock or five o'clock in centre curriculum um someone might do we've had saturday morning clubs we have children over the holidays and stuff like that it's not one size fits all certainly and i think we've been allowed that flexibility one from the commissioner and the schools who we serve as well so it's rare that we're not able to meet the needs we might have to adapt sometimes i think the majority of the children the majority of the time with us are able to do the nine o'clock so three o'clock and our design systems ensure that we personalize it for them there are a handful of children who would make adaptations to the curriculum just because they probably can't handle the full day or sometimes the dynamics or you know all sorts of different things like that so yeah we the flexibility is critical for us and do you think that if you introduce that flexibility and you enact the environment or the curriculum to meet the needs of each child in that way that all of our children are capable of succeeding yeah i think so i think we have a design system we have something that we call our curriculum floor chart it's how you design and like i say our design system is between four and six weeks long we gather at that first stage we gather loads of intelligence we work with we work with other agencies we work with referring schools we work with parents we work with the child themselves and what we try and do during that first stage is we try and understand what their smh needs what their academic abilities what are the social needs what their previous attendance patterns and what are the typical behaviors what are the triggers how can we go upstream and help them earlier and we pay into a really really personalised profile we then have a massive menu of services and off that menu of services we allocate to each child so each child has got then they take options from our curriculum menu we then begin to understand how they best learn you know and have the best learning vocational small group individually so to learn these styles and take into consideration we allocate them the key worker it's really important that we do that and what support they need we look at we support it they require from external agencies and then we begin the process of trying to implement the plan in terms of executing the plan in terms of teaching learning support i think that because of those design systems because of their early identification systems we can find a way with most children i think if we as i said earlier this is where i think this is where sometimes we cringe a little bit i think in some of the provision that's not doing quite as well with their children i think if a child starts and you throw them straight into seven or eight GCSE classes i think it's a classic trap i'm not saying that our way is the right way it works for us and what it generally does it ensures that children the work is pitched well um the the anxieties are reduced correctly um and we think that we've got appropriate provision for appropriate children at the appropriate time um the challenges is at the end of the the review period whether or not if we've got it right and if we're seeing signs that the children um are achieving successes against their personal success targets do we then look at a return to mainstream or do we push it a little bit further to challenge them because it's very hard to recreate a mainstream position or a mainstream school in in a class where they're only taught with eight of the children or in a centre that's only got 30 children so that's the challenge for us but at the review stage we then ask ourselves are they ready to return or they need to apply a little bit more challenge so review is crucial for us as well going back to your original question i think that if you if you design well and you get enough at that design stage that intense stage if you get enough if you get enough intelligence from everybody i think that you can design in order to try and make the children more successful than they have been previously and that's how we do we call it our three eyes floor chart intelligence led design intelligence led delivery and review and then decide what happens next if they're experiencing consistent successes we'll put them back out into a mainstream set so um if they're not then we'll go back to the start of the cycle and we'll design again to see if we can find the right way we go back many times we don't get it right first time you know which we we're not about that at all i think that design deliver review is it's a bit like the old um assess plan do review but we we just used it now with the the oft-ed language it's intent implantation and impact and and if impact's not quite right we'll go back and we'll sort the intent bit out again it's like everything in education isn't it you hang around long enough and there's language coming back in now that we have 20 years ago isn't it but yeah but but absolutely critical you know get them at the right part of the menu and feed them the right diet and and I think that you can the critical bit is if you get the diet wrong and and we we see that and we've been in the school recently we're doing some school to school support and the other most ambitious curriculum i've ever seen in AP and actually the children they have nine lessons a day history geography math English science etc etc there wasn't a single part of the day where we were looking at the phase one issues around their mental health around their wellbeing and their resilience from their ability to share around experiencing failure and what happens when that happens around their behaviour around reducing anxiety in the classroom not one single opportunity and they were wondering why the children were running through the school and there was no discipline at all and they thought it was a behaviour issue it wasn't it was a it was a menu issue the diet was wrong for the children and you know we see that a lot and yeah that's it and i guess that's one of the things that's very very different from many children when they land with you it must feel very different for them compared to perhaps where they've been where they've been struggling before do you enjoy it do you enjoy it i love everything i love mumbys absolutely love mumbys yeah i love it i love it i think we're making a real difference i think we i think when we speak about children my wife's often in the background she's not in education and um she said every single child you talk about is a good lad aren't they're a good girl i think we suffer from good lad syndrome we we see that with the title of the film on it good lad syndrome we love it we love the children i love my staff i think they've inspired me every single day i think that we're very lucky to do the job some of our children have had it terrible you know and what an opportunity we've got to serve them and to make life a little bit better for them so yeah we love mumbys um well like our holidays and our weekends as well um but no every minute of it it's different it's a challenge it's it's good fun it's tragic at times um i wouldn't swap it for anything and what does the next year have in store for you how do you you know thinking about that idea around kind of recovery curriculum and all that stuff what are the big things that are keeping you awake at night at the moment and what you're looking forward to the thing the thing that's worrying me is the age profile of the children that are coming through they're coming through younger we're getting we're getting um young primary age children we're getting a heck of a lot of year sevens um Bolton again have been magnificent there's we have to understand why year sixes are coping in primary schools aren't year sevens are coping in secondary schools we have to understand that that works going on and the the secondary head and the primary executive heads are working on that at the moment it worries me enormously about the age profile of the children that are coming through because if they've not brought those EHCPs in year seven are they going to be with me for two three four years do we then become a de facto special school what happened to the carousel type approach of AP um i worry that's my biggest concern i think is that the the the young ones coming through now that's not we we were always key stage four you know when they got to year 10 and the schools have probably done all they could with them Bolton schools are extremely tolerant they're exceptional um why are there so many year sevens leaking into us at the moment is is is a real concern we're working with the authorities we're working with the schools we've got to enhance our key stage three offer um and we know that so that's the big project in the next 12 months i think what are you excited about what you're looking forward to doing that i think i think doing a bit of that i think we always love working with some brilliant people um as i mentioned Sarah, Steve, Amy Smith, people like that and they've got more they're amazing people, Matt Morrie, Sandy, the proof guys love working with them learning from them the networking opportunities will come back more and more getting out into some inquiry visits and going looking at some real top practice i was in Stockton with Emily and the team up there brilliant school you know to go and learn from people so to to to resuscitate networking opportunities i think is exciting to learn from those great people yeah i think that that as well yeah be really nice to be able to yeah do those things again won't it although you know there's lots of things that we gain during during lockdown and the pandemic times that will completely change how we do things forever i think i think one of the things that's really come we were asked the question recently you know i think not as an add-on but as part of our offer now we're going to continue to use the technology to teach children you know even if they come here every minute of the day we're going to use it as a blended offer as well and i know um one of the local secondary schools is next autumn actually Smiddles School um they've really done some some good thinking around this and we're going to learn from them because i think there's opportunities to teach children even better and to to really look at those opportunities so yeah i think an exciting 12 months ahead certainly yes we try to yeah try and think what we want the yeah want life to look like um in the future yeah exciting times what thought would you like to leave people with i always think that the you know the last thing that you say during the podcast kind of sits and resonates with people what thought would you like people to go away with in their mind i oh gosh what a question what a question that is i think that i think i think that the process or i think the system or the idea or the thinking around good lads syndrome is important i i met a girl called Courtney um a few years ago on the car park here she was starting and um i went out to see her said hello nice to me i'm the executive principal um i talked to her about what had happened in school i talked to her about her family i said that we'll really support you if there's anything you want from us um we'll give it you anything at all we'll help you with as i walked away i probably she turned around to the member of staff and said i wish you were my dad um that'll do for me that that'll do for me and if we can do that and that was a 10 minute conversation with the new pupil you know we have got to show these children that we love them we've got to show these children you know that we care that much about them that we're vested in them because i think i think when they feel it you know we we change lives and i think good lads syndrome is not a bad idea i don't think so we're going to look for the good in every child yeah i think so and hopefully they'll see the good in us because we do you know we we do hopefully it's actually we're passionate about them doing well and you know if they can feel it then we've got half a chance on work