 And welcome to this first School Education Gateway Teacher Academy webinar of 2020. Today we'll be talking about tackling early school leaving, taking into account the whole school approach. And today we have two experts talking about this topic, Dr. Kirsten Kerr and Dr. Patsy Hudson from Manchester. But I will leave it to our speakers to introduce themselves. And if you have any questions just type them into the chat box, we'll take them from there. So we're very pleased to see all of you here and also a big thank you for the speakers for joining us. I think we can start with the presentation and see your slides are here. Okay, well thank you for that introduction. My name is Kirsten Kerr from the University of Manchester and my colleague Patsy Hudson you will hear from very shortly. And she works at Manchester Communication Academy, which is a high school in Manchester. We're going to talk about a whole school approach to tackling early school leaving. And in particular about Manchester Communication Academy's pastoral tracking programme and an initiative it has called the Family Zone of Schools. So we'll explain all about those as we go through. So the webinar today is going to be in three parts. Firstly, we're hoping to show you a real life example from Patsy School. So we've got a video that we're hoping to show you in a moment. Then I want to give you some tools for thinking about early school leaving because as you'll see from the video, it's a very complex issue. And there are lots of different things to unpack. Firstly, about understanding why it is that children become at risk of leaving school early, but also about the things that schools and their partners might do in response to that. And then in the third part, Patsy is going to talk from her experience within schools. So you'll get a deep professional insight into the pastoral tracking programme that they've developed. We thought that it might be useful also to have some questions to think about during the webinar as we're talking. So we'd be interested to find out if there's anything you'd ideally like to do in tackling early school leaving in your particular school context. We're interested in finding out what the barriers to doing this might be. And we'd be interested in finding out something about how you think those barriers might be overcome. So we're hoping that we can give you some ideas around those things as we talk. But equally, it's a chance for you to ask us questions and to ask each other questions which we might be able to help with. So that's the plan for the webinar. So in a moment, we'll hopefully show you a short video that we've made as part of the European Toolkit for Schools on Manchester Communication Academy and the Pastoral Tracking programme. But just to give you a little bit of background information before we show you that film. The Communication Academy is a secondary school. So that means it's for 11 to 16 year olds, which in the English education system we call years 7 to 11, but it's 11 to 16 year olds. It's a school with 1,200 students and they all come from the local neighbourhood. So they mainly come from within walking distance of the school. So there's a very close connection with the community. That local neighbourhood is one of the top 10 most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in England. So when we look at measuring disadvantage, whether that's by poverty, ill health, unemployment, high levels of crime, all of those things combined, it's a very highly disadvantaged neighbourhood. So it's just to give you an idea of that context. And then 60 to 70% of the pupils at the Communication Academy qualify for additional funding for disadvantage. So we call that the pupil premium fund, but that's for families who qualify for free school lunch or who have qualified for free school lunch in the last six years. So it's for low income families. I've mentioned also that we're going to show you a video about the Pastoral Tracking programme. And so just to explain what we mean by pastoral support in our particular context, we're talking about supporting students' whole wellbeing. So that's physical and emotional help, their ability to cope with a challenging situation, to make good decisions, to stay safe, to be resilient. So we're looking at all of those wider things which contribute to those students' wellbeing. So what we're going to do now is to hopefully show you the video that we've made. It might play a little bit slowly, but please bear with us. Okay, can you hear me? Okay, now it should be working, sorry. Yeah, so bear with us. If you miss any parts of this video, please note that we will share it afterwards as well. So not to worry, it's just to give you the context. I'm Malilla. I'm 16 years of age. I'm the oldest sibling out of six. At the start of the year, my ability to come into school was very poor. I wasn't merely interested. I had no care in the world. The Manchester Communication Academy has been built in one of the most disadvantaged areas in England. The children face lots of social issues which impede their ability to succeed academically. And so our job then is to galvanise any support to mitigate against that impact of that disadvantage. So we proactively recruited partners, community partners. And we did that partly on making sure that we had all the main services represented. We had the health authority. We had voluntary sector providers there. So we had a local food bank, two different social housing. We also collaborate very closely with 16 other schools. And we've named ourselves really the family zone of schools. So in the case of Amber Lily, there were some financial difficulties. So we knew that the school already runs a food store. So we provided food parcels and help really with relocating into a much more suitable home. Sometimes Vicky now and then brings big bags of food around to the house. She helped me a lot and she helps my mum build her confidence as well by having chats with her. Amber Lily has got real talent in music. And what the school were able to do were to identify that talent. And we've got some very gifted staff here who were able to link up with us right away. That's been a real access point back into school. The store is not finished yet and her attendance is still improving. But the dramatic difference is that when she is here, which is much more frequently, she's totally engaged. The big improvement was confidence. This school has been realised what things I can actually achieve if I actually put my mind to it. And the help may follow the steps that I need to be followed and the path to go down. The one thing that makes me feel really optimistic about her is she's a one-off. She knows what she wants and she has the capability of making her own pathway. Our exam results for the last couple of years have been really stunning. Our disadvantaged children got better results than the national average, which is incredible. Because what that actually says in short is that no matter how disadvantaged they are, we've been able to mitigate the impact of all those disadvantages. Hope everyone was able to see the video. If not, we will share it afterwards on the webinar page. So having shown you that video and hopefully you've been able to watch it along with us, firstly you'll have met Patsy, so you'll know who's speaking later and you can ask her about it. But also, I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on the things that you've seen in that video. Because Manchester Communication Academy is, I think, quite distinct in its approach to tackling early school leaving with its whole child, whole school approach. So just to reflect on that video for a moment. Firstly, we've seen that they have a personalised teaching and learning supports in place. So for instance, you've seen Patsy talking about how the staff are gifted in working with students, how they're able to support them individually and how that school was able to create a personalised learning opportunity for Amber Lilly with her music and her singing and how that's helped to re-engage her in school. So that's one aspect of the approach that they have. Then you've also seen how the school is working with the family. And some of that's around meeting financial needs and housing needs and providing food. So meeting those really basic material needs, not just for Amber Lilly but for her wider family. But also working with that family to improve confidence. And you heard Amber Lilly say, entirely unscripted, that the school is helping to build her mum's confidence and she recognises that. And then you also heard about the range of partnerships that the school has. So you'll have heard Patsy just mention there the family zone of schools, which we'll come back to later. But that's about all of the schools in that community who work with those families working together to support those families. So as you've seen, Amber Lilly is the oldest of six. And so there are younger children in other schools in the neighbourhood. And how can those schools work together to support the family. But also you'll have seen how the schools are working with a whole range of external services. So with health services, with voluntary and community groups. And in that video, you saw an example of the partnerships that they have with a social housing provider when they talked about how the house the family had before wasn't very suitable. And they've been able to work with a housing provider to find more suitable accommodation. And it's all of those things together, which have helped to create a positive pathway for Amber Lilly, where she's saying that the schools helped her to see what she can achieve. She's attending school more often. She's more engaged in her learning and she's getting better outcomes. So it's that wide range of provision that the school has been able to put in place. Which deals not just with the academic side of Amber Lilly's engagement in education, but looks at learning much more broadly, both for herself in school with her family and within her community. And it's all of those things together that the school has been able to do, which is helping to create that positive pathway. And so when we're talking about a whole child, whole school approach, we're looking at these things very holistically and looking at how all of the resources within the community could be brought together and used to support families. Now that's really complicated to try to unpack, which was why we wanted early on to provide you with some thinking tools for starting to think about whole child needs and what that looks like within their local context and environment and how schools could engage with that. So I've got a short series of tools and approaches which might help you to think about that in your own work. So the first thing that I've found that's very helpful in working with schools and in my work with the Communication Academy is to think about the causes of early school leaving and to think about them in what we call an ecological approach or an ecosystem approach. And this has become a very popular way of thinking to help to unpack some of the complexities of the challenges that schools face and that children and families face in preventing early school leaving. So I'll just talk you through it briefly just to give you an idea of how it might help you to think holistically. So in the middle, the purple circle in the middle is all about the child as an individual and their interests and abilities and things that they want to be able to achieve. So we've seen from the video of Amber Lilly, for instance, that she's got real talent in music and that's something which is individual to her and really understanding her interests and talents is important. But then there's a question of all of the contexts in which Amber Lilly is embedded. So what's her life like at home? What's her life like in school? What are the facilities in her local neighborhood that she has access to? And thinking about all of those immediate contexts and whether they are helping to support her in being able to achieve and engage in school. Then there's the question of how those things interact with each other. So it's not just thinking about her home environment, her school environment, her peer group, but thinking about, well, how does her home life and her peer group interact? And how does that then impact on her experience in school? So is everything in her local environment and all the different environments that she engages with supporting her? Or is she getting conflicting messages or is home an environment where it's very difficult to do work which would support her in school? If home is not suitable? If she doesn't have a space in which to do her own private work? Or Patsy will tell you stories about children who are living in homes which are damp and cold and don't have proper heating and it's not a good environment and it's not a healthy environment. And those things make it very difficult for them to come to school and to concentrate and to be able to do the work that they need to do to support them in school. So there's also a question of thinking about how those different things interact. And then there's the question of thinking about all of the things which shaped those environments in which the child is immediately engaged. So for example, you can see that at about five o'clock there's transit system on the diagram in the orange circle. So if it is that maybe a school provides lots of after school extracurricular activities which would be really supportive for a child like Amber Lilley. But maybe there isn't the transport for her to get home later after school so she can't engage in those activities. So again, that's something important to think about what those wider barriers might be. And so this kind of model is just a way of helping you to think about all of the things which might help to cause children to find themselves vulnerable to early school leaving. So it's not just the immediate cause but what are all of the things which contribute to that. So perhaps Amber Lilley isn't coming to school regularly but is there something about her home environment, about the work that her parents do, about the transport system. All of those things together which might be preventing her from being able to come to school regularly. So it's just a way of helping to unpack the complexity of the lives that those children are leading. In doing that, I'm not suggesting that schools should be able to address every single one of those things. I mean schools can't run the transport system, that's not appropriate. But it is a way of being able to think about what are the things which might be preventing children coming to school or engaging with school or making them vulnerable to dropping out of school and early school leaving. And thinking about is there something which we could do to influence or change that environment which could help them to come. So it might not be fixing the transport system, that's not your job. But it might be that it's possible to make an arrangement which would help that child to come to school. So it's a way of helping to think about that and how to unpack that. It's also a way of helping to think about who the partners are or the external stakeholders are that you might need to work with to address some of those issues. So it's not saying that you as a school need to do those things necessarily, but maybe you need to be able to identify who it is who can do those things and can work with you. Whether that's the housing provider, whether it's an employer, whether it's a transport manager, whoever it is, it's also a way of helping to think about that. So that's our first tool for helping to think about early school leaving. Then there's a question I think of what it is or what channels and influence you have through your school, which can help you to address some of those issues that you've seen through that kind of ecological model. So there's a question of how you can use your school governance to support you in thinking about developing a whole school approach to tackling early school leaving. So at that high leadership level, what kind of vision is there of how the school can support children holistically? How can that senior leadership help to distribute the kinds of work that might need to be done to address a wide range of issues? How can those school leaders help to build the networks and the partnerships that you need to be able to do that? So that's one aspect that you might want to focus on. Another aspect that you might focus on is around learner support. So do you have the opportunity to personalize your curriculum in some way to help to engage learners or to develop new pedagogical styles which would help to engage them? Do you have opportunities to develop extra curricular activities and support which might be engaging for them? Could you put in place more kinds of pastoral support or different pastoral support? Can you support them in thinking about careers and how to get there and what pathway they would need to follow? So there are lots of things that can be thought about there as well. There's also then thinking about how teachers might need support to develop the skills to be able to understand the causes and the causes of the causes of early school leaving. There's thinking about the kinds of career development opportunities they might need, thinking about the kinds of training that they might need to be able to recognize children who are at risk of early school leaving. There's also a question of thinking about how it is that you work with your parents and families and how to communicate with them effectively, how to gain their trust and how to cooperate with them in supporting both them and their children in engaging in education. And then there's the question of the external stakeholders that you need to be able to build relationships with and how you can work with them to develop a common strategy. So there are lots of different ways of focusing your efforts to develop a whole school approach to early school leaving. So let me show you also how very briefly how Manchester Communication Academy has gone about using all of those different channels to addressing early school leaving and has created a structure which has strong governance and leadership support to distribute some of that work. So I'll talk you through this diagram very briefly and Patsy will be able to explain much better than I later on. But just to give you an idea, in order to engage with all of those different ways of addressing early school leaving, if I start at the top, the Communication Academy has got a strong governing body, strong governing and leadership system. So there's a senior leadership team and they are supported by governors from business and from education and to our parents and from local employers. So they have that whole vision for the school and that whole vision of what it means to support children and families. Then they have a leadership structure which focuses on teaching and learning. And there are leaders who help the school to develop a broad curriculum, creative pedagogies, linked to employment, and also make sure that there are opportunities to learn outside the classroom. But they also have a very strong leadership team around what they call the Social Investment Department. And so there are senior leaders within that team who help to develop community programs, careers programs, cultural opportunities. You look at health and wellbeing, pastoral support, material needs, so the food bank that you saw for instance. And so the school itself has been structured to make sure that there is strong vision and leadership for all of those things, but that there are also strong leaders in place to lead on different aspects of that whole school approach to early school leaving. They've also recognised, as I said, that it's really important that they have partnerships with other schools within the local area. And so in addition to working within their school on teaching and learning and social investment, they also initiated something called the Families Owners Schools. So that's 17 local schools, so Manchester Communication Academy and 16 local primary schools, so for children aged 5 to 11. And they work together to develop a strategy for the whole area and looking at how they can support children at home, children in school and children in the community. So as well as the school putting in all of this effort to developing its whole school approach, it's connecting with other schools to develop a whole area approach. So it's not just about making sure that children within Manchester Communication Academy are able to succeed within school, but it's about all of the schools working together to ensure that all of the children within the area can succeed in school. And to help to govern that and to create the vision for that, they've set up a neighbourhood charity, which, instead of just thinking about the interests of the school, has a wide range of stakeholders whose job it is to think about the interests of the whole neighbourhood and all of the children in the neighbourhood. And so they've created a structure which matches the ambition and vision that they have to engage with a wide range of issues that you saw in that ecological model. And then just the final thing that I'd like to invite you to think about. So we thought about the sociology, we thought about the different channels of influence that schools have. We thought about how schools can make a structure which will allow them to act on those different things. And the final thing I'd like to invite you to think about is about the importance of the local environment and local neighbourhood. And so that family zone of schools, here we have a map of the family zone and the schools are marked on it. But this is effectively the local neighbourhood area. And so all of those schools are facing the same kinds of challenges and they have the same kinds of opportunities and they're working with the same families often because there are children in the primary and secondary school. And they're working often with the same external stakeholders, so the same housing association and the same food banks and the same education psychologists and so on. So it makes sense that because they're all facing those kinds of very similar issues that collectively they can bring more resource and more expertise to addressing that. Now the boundaries of this area are not hard and fast. So it's not a case of some schools are in and some schools are out. It's a case of those schools working together and building the partnerships and understandings about the common issues they share and about how they can support each other in working together to do that. The other thing I think that's important is if you're working on a set of issues as a school, the chances are that other schools which are local to you might have the same kinds of challenges and together you might be able to develop a more effective and wide reaching approach. Now Patsy's going to tell you a lot more about the nitty-gritty of being able to develop and work in those ways. So just before I hand you over to her, one other thing I think it's really important to stress which is what I've just showed you, those tools and structures and ways of thinking and this neighborhood family zone of schools. That's been 10 years in development and it's an approach that has evolved over time and it's still evolving and the more they do the more complex their thinking gets and the wider the range of partners there are and the more sophisticated the structures become. So it doesn't just happen all at once. This has been a long time in development and it's a case of starting with a particular focus and really doing it well and embedding it and building on that success. So I shall hand over now to Patsy who will explain to you how they've done that in relation particularly to the pastoral tracking program. Hello everybody, I need to start by apologizing for my voice because I've got a sore throat at the moment. So I'll speak more slowly than usual and hope that you can hear me clearly. First of all, thank you to Kirsten for the introduction and so much of the approach of the school has been developed in partnership with Manchester University so we've worked for a long time together on the development of some of the programs in our school. Also I've really enjoyed reading the discussion panel of the chats that are going on and there's just such a really interesting discussion around these issues already between yourselves. We have had an incredible opportunity in Manchester Communication Academy of building a school from nothing. There was no school in the area, no secondary school and 12% of children were not going on from primary school at the age of 11. They weren't going on into their secondary education and so that was one of the challenges really that not only about keeping and retaining children in school but making sure that they actually came to school in the first place after primary school and I wanted just to illustrate the challenges around that area with a story because when we first started we had a remit to build a £32 million building and to then recruit staff and recruit children to that school and this started, our work started in 2008 and the school opened in 2010 and during that period just before we were about to open we had a visit from a parent and we didn't even have a building then we just had a porter cabin kind of temporary building and this woman came to us practically every day to ask us if she could secure a place for her son in our school which was about to open and the reason she was so desperate for him to come was because he had been permanently excluded from primary school which meant that he would no longer belong to the mainstream school system in the UK but he would have to go to specialist provision and the reasons for that were because his behaviour was so poor and so challenging in his primary school and she came to us because she knew we would only have one year group and it would be a brand new start and she asked every single day and we considered and considered because usually when a child has been permanently excluded they go on immediately to specialist provision so it would be an unusual step for us to interrupt that process and in the end we decided to give him a chance and he came to school on the first day with all our other students and almost immediately he demonstrated really difficult and challenging behaviour and that behaviour impacted on the other children how they were learning on their safety and also on the staff and how they were able to teach with him in their lessons and I had several meetings with the parents during this period to try and look at different strategies and look at different ways of how we could basically make things a lot better for him so that he could understand the reasons why he was not behaving properly but in the end we tried almost everything, we'd exhausted everything and I asked the parents to come in to talk to them about perhaps moving him on to specialist provision we're all very heavy hearted about this prospect and when she came in, the mum came in on her own that day and when she came in we were talking and I just said I feel like it's not working out and she agreed with me and she said yes I agree with you but I can't thank you enough for giving him a try for giving him a chance and then just at that moment it was almost as if the professional relationship was suspended and we were just two mothers together in the room and he was there, the boy was sitting there as well, the little boy and then she said to me I wasn't planning to have another child I'm an older parent and she said when I found out he was on the way she said I was quite taken aback by it all because it wasn't in my life plan and then she said to me something really interesting she said one night I went to bed and I fell asleep and I had a dream and in the dream I dreamt that it was going to be a boy and somebody in the dream told me that he would grow up to be an honourable man and just even using the word honourable is quite an old fashioned word in the English language and then she looked at him and she kind of pulled a face in disappointment and sighed heavily and gave him the message that you know so much for that dream coming true she just looked at him with absolute disappointment and in that split second he reached forward and he just got touched a leg and he said I'm not big yet mummy and in other words there's still time for your dream to come true and when he said that for me as a professional and experienced professional it takes a lot to take me aback but that moment really took me aback and it made me absolutely stop in my tracks and think he's right, he isn't big yet he isn't the finished article and yet the school system including the professionals including myself were about to set him outside of the mainstream experience and change his life forever by so doing and I very rarely go back on decisions that I've made but that was one moment when I did and I just said to him I don't know how this can work out but let's just give this one more chance let's see what else we can do and I don't know to this day what it actually was whether it's because he'd heard his mum's dream whether it was because he was giving his absolute final chance I don't know he never ever did anything wrong in school again he put all his energies into learning into studying into teamwork into being a good classmate and a good student and at this moment in time he's in university now studying medicine and the upshot of that story the result of the kind of thing of that story is that as a school we took three huge lessons from that story and the first one was how precarious life is for a child who is disadvantaged and the reason for taking that lesson from it is really obvious because every time I think about that situation my blood runs cold because I feel what if she hadn't told that story that day what if he hadn't responded in that way what if I hadn't responded in the way I responded and it kind of galvanized us as a school right at the very beginning not to be part of the problem not for us as an institution not to be part of making children's life even more precarious even more complex and difficult than it already is and we sat down because at that time we had a lot of luxurious senior leaders of the school to talk and to reflect and to decide and plan things properly and to think even just to think and I know for all of you who work in schools just taking that time to actually reflect on things is very very precious to have those moments and we did have that opportunity at the beginning and what we decided was that if we were going to make a difference to disadvantage and to mitigate the impact of disadvantage on our children and on their families and on their community we would have to know three things we would have to know what we wanted for our children then we would have to know what the barriers were to us achieving those outcomes and then we would have to know to what extent we could remove those barriers and what that led us to first of all is trying to really ascertain what we wanted for our children and at the very beginning of the first year we'd said to all our staff because we've got our first children coming in and we had two days where we were training beforehand and we actually said to our staff what are you wishing for these children if you had wishes what would you wish for these children who are coming in in two days and the screen that you can see now this is the composite of those wishes but this is not just one year of doing this we've done this every single year for ten years and this is what our changing staff body says every single year that we would want our children to be asset rich, to be resilient to make good or better academic progress at each key stage of their education to be healthy in every way to be able to secure their employment opportunities of their choice and to contribute to their community and to have a positive sense of their lived reality and in order for that to happen children have to be in school they have to stay in school for the duration and they have to thrive and prosper in school as well and many of us will be familiar with these kind of outcomes articulated in this way for children but I often just take a minute to think if every one of our 1200 children got realized these outcomes in their lives it would be a revolution in terms of the impact of disadvantage on children in regard to their education and we also determined at that point to do something about our own learning and our own understanding of those barriers which would prevent our children realizing those outcomes and so we began to really look outside of the school building and look outside of our school institution outside of the school wars and try as Kirsten has demonstrated today in the things she's been saying about the things beyond the actual child that actually impact on the child's potential for success and we started with the way that our government characterizes our area where our school is built and we spent a lot of time understanding the statistical characterizations of the area and although it sounds a little bit stodgy it was incredibly helpful to us and we looked at the system which is the index of multiple deprivation and I'm sure there will be equivalents in your country but in this country what happens is on a four-yearly basis the government looks at the population of England and Wales which is 70 million and it divides them into small areas of 1,500 population which it names lower super output areas and then it gathers statistics about those small populations using seven categories and those categories are income, employment, education, skills and training health and deprivation, disability, crime, housing and services and the living environment as you can see there and then when it gets all those statistics it rank orders them it's got some very clever ways of scoring areas against these domains and then it rank orders them from one to 47,500 one being the most disadvantaged now that gives us a really good idea of where our school and our area sit in terms of how disadvantaged they are perceived to be and it was not a huge surprise to us to know that ours was in our school and our catchment area was in the top 1% of most disadvantaged LSOS in England and Wales and if you have a look at this map the yellow area in the northeast of Manchester is exactly where our school sits and that is in the top 1% the entire area is in the top 1% of most disadvantaged areas in England and then what we had to do is not just leave that there and say how does that represent itself how does all that information and those statistical measurements characterisations how does that represent itself in the lives of our children who come through the door every day and what we found was it forms itself into 10 risk categories so we know that if children fall into any one of these risk categories not just in this country but in all affluent countries they are most likely to underachieve compared with their peers who are in more privileged circumstances so for example children who speak English as an additional language in this country as a cohort almost always underperform compared to children who don't children who are in poverty children who have been traumatised children who travel who are travelling families like Roma families children who have got international new arrivals who come without a visa sometimes into the country children who are caring for their families children who are in the health arena or the safeguarding arena almost always underperform as a cohort and so then what we thought we could do is just it would be so intelligent really to scope that problem not just in our school but in all our schools in all our family zone of schools which Kirsten has talked to you about so in all 17 schools we developed a master tracker and all we did in the first instance simply was just to see how many of our children fell into how many of these categories and what we found was very very stark so in our school in Manchester Communication Academy for example 88% of the schools cohort fall into these categories multiply so one of these categories is enough to make sure that that child doesn't achieve and doesn't do well if they fall in twice or three times or four times so on that confounds their chances even more their chances become even more complex so to say that 88% of the schools population are likely to under-achieve multiply for multiple reasons is the fact that is the reality and then times that by 17 other schools in a tiny geographical area and this then we understand the barriers that we are facing and somebody in the chat earlier on talked about the video and said about this being one child and that concurred with me so much that that story of Amber Lily is about one child but we are critically aware that we've not just got one child in our school cohort 88% of 1200 children are the children who are least likely to succeed to stay in school to come to school in the first place to do well in school to thrive in school and that's the challenge we're faced with and having been faced with that challenge we then moved on to see what our next steps should be and the second lesson that we learned from the story that I told you at the beginning was that whatever we did pasturally needed to be a system and a process and it needed to be something that was continuously and consistently applied all the time and the reason for that was we couldn't leave anything else to chance because there is enough left to chance in the lives of the children already without the professionals and the schools adding to that by developing an ad hoc pastoral system so we decided that whatever we would do it would be systematised and this is our structure CID stands for Social Investment Department and that's our department and the department has the strategic oversight of all the behaviour in the school the attendance and the health of the children it also directly provides a huge programme of community learning the whole family's own project with the programme of 17 schools working together and it directly provides the safeguarding for the children and the local community and then we developed another system and this is it, I know it doesn't look very much like a system but this system is at the absolute heart and comes again from the lessons from the story that I mentioned at the beginning because what we realised in that story we realised it multiple times after that when we talked to families and parents is just how how great a resource our families and parents are and that very often where schools dismiss the parents as the cause of the problems in our case what we've discovered is they are incredible asset because they have a unique body of knowledge that we don't have the knowledge of their families back story they have expert knowledge of their child in a way we could never possibly have so what we've developed and I always say this and I say it to you just the same if anybody wants to come and visit and see it in action then you'd be more than welcome but in the first instance what we realised is if we were going to have any impact we had to develop a system that told us the second a child was falling out of the mainstream and we were to intervene there and then and we always compare this to Disneyland you know that the vision of Disneyland is that before the floors get dirty they are mopped before the lights go out they are changed and that's how our pastoral system works almost imperceptibly before the problem begins to arise and the child begins to stumble we intervene we intervene at the very very outset of the first signs of anything going wrong and the way we intervene is we bring the whole family together excuse me whoever we can whoever will come and talk to us we ask them to come together with us and we make it extremely clear that this is a meeting of experts that we're not here to tell them how to be a good parent we're not here to fix their family life we are here because we all love their child and we all want the very very very best for their child and so we work together and once we've got that meeting really relaxed and we spend a lot of time in those meetings but a whole morning, a whole afternoon if we do that ten times we do it ten times we don't mind and what we do is we make a plan to co-construct a plan for their child so whatever we do plan to do we do it together we never do anything that the parent isn't happy or the family are not happy with and neither do we do anything that we're not happy with either we work together and we'll spend hours and hours and hours talking and listening critically listening to the story how things have got to where they are and always, absolutely always in every single case there is a light bulb moment where you think oh this is it you know this is something we can intervene with this is something we can work together on this is something we can support with and I could tell you a hundred stories of those light bulb moments and the light bulb moments are where everybody around the table thinks yes this is it we can do something about this if I can just tell you the end result of that because I've obviously got the time to talk through every single story or any story for that matter but when the mum sat down in that room with me and became a mum and just said I had a dream that was the light bulb moment there and I think it was the light bulb moment for her son as well and for me as an experienced professional that was the moment where I thought oh you know this is the way forward this isn't the end of the road this isn't the time to give up this is the time to start this is the time to make a beginning and if I say to you since we've practised this approach 88% of the children sorry not 88% over 90% of the children who have had one of these kind of meetings and approaches and interventions are back on track within the term they're back on track within the term and how that displays itself quantifiably is that for the last four years our exam results given the huge disadvantage our children are facing our exam results our children do better than the national average in other words they do better than the most privileged children in the country they do better than the national average and although it's not all about exam results their attendance is better than the national average their behaviour is impeccable the way they behave that what they go on to be and become is incredible so many of them go on to university so many of them are pursuing professional careers so many of them leave school with a raft of skills and successes behind them and it is our belief that and I agree with a lot of the comments that you've made that we are incredibly blessed to have the resources we have and to have had the fresh start that we've had and if all schools had that possibly everybody would be conducting webinars now in the same things but what we believe is unique about our school is that we have recognised our parents and our families are an utter asset to us we've recognised that we as professionals need to be part of the solution and not the problem we've recognised that we have to go way way way beyond the work that a school normally is perceived to do we've recognised that there should never be a moment when the light bulb doesn't come on and the child parts company with the school and parts company with their own future at that point and so I just leave you with those thoughts and hopefully we'll be able to pick up some of your your comments and responses thank you very much for listening so yeah maybe first hear a question from Athanasia about like the really the practicality so with these wonderful ideas but what would you say is the first step here so but who starts this at school who organises these networks do you have any particular advices on how to get this rolling I think again for us we were in a unique position in that we started a brand new school and it was very unusual because my job was actually appointed as it was a vice principal job and I was the second person appointed but it was for social investment so in that sense we were uniquely placed and if I were going to another school now that was well established in a disadvantaged area where would I begin in that sense and where I would is I would start small and I would change the system so that parents could be involved in every aspect of the process and I would make sure that we built a cohort of partners around us both from within education and outside education because those two things have been the basis of our entire pastoral system and have been successful and I can it's good to say I can add something to that as well because I work with more schools than just Manchester Communication Academy and so I work with schools which have a lot less resources which haven't had a fresh start and the way in which I normally start doing this kind of work is by analysing who it is in their school that they think might be at risk of early school leaving and not just using the numbers though the numbers are really important but I've sat down and talked to them about who are the children that you are most worried about not thinking about the numbers and why are you worried about them and what are the factors that make you worried and sometimes they talk about the children's behaviour in school and how they think that's related to the fact that they know that the child's mother has some health problems and is unemployed and there's some financial concerns and they talk about those issues and then we talk about who is it who could be a partner with you to help you to address some of those things detailed understanding of the context and of what professionals know about the lives of those children because they know a lot and that helps to identify who those partners need to be and when you go to those partners you can say to them these are the children and families that we're working with and these are their stories and this is how you can help us in this situation and often when we have been to work with housing or to work with local doctors they identify the same sets of problems that they see every day in their work and so they have an incentive to want to work with the school because they see the same challenges and so I would start by really analysing who's at risk and why do you think that is what are the underlying causes Thanks a lot Any other questions? No it's already six o'clock I was wondering Christina Patsy do you want to go to the polls or do you want to take more questions? I'm happy to set more questions if you if you have any perhaps this way so if you have any final questions for the speakers or any thoughts that you had I see lots of motivated I was going to say just while people are thinking Patsy not to put you on the spot but off the top of your head about how many students do you work with on the pastoral tracking programme each term so each semester? Well it's very difficult to say really everybody what we do is we keep everybody on the track monitored but if they're fine we leave them alone but if they start to tip or you know you can see that they're getting into problem then we will work with them so just to give one example from September this year to now to today I have met with 65 parents myself 65 families and that we have a big team so it's not that we're just working with one child 10, 15 meetings but also just there was another question that came up before which I thought was really interesting because it was posed to us as well when we first started that what do you do with the parents when they won't engage and you know that they won't accept what you're saying and so on and there was an awful lot of myth around that in this area where people other practitioners other schools were saying to us you won't get the parents in and all I can say is that absolutely not been our experience that all our parents everybody we've met have been willing to come in because they want a better life for their child and also that they love their child they do love their child but when we come in we don't meet with them on the terms that we are looking at them in a deficit way we're partners in this process and that makes all the difference a lot of comments on this parent-school collaboration that I'm sure there's also a lot more to unpack any other maybe final questions I pass so it's going to just one other thing which I think is really important about the fact that Patsy is able to work with so many families is as she said they've got a system and as I showed you in the slide there is a structure which enables strong leadership around all of those different elements and so those partnerships are already in place so when they're working with a family and they identify a range of needs whether it's about health and housing and personalising learning they already have relationships with stakeholders that they can work with to help to realise those plans exactly what I wanted to also say it's not just a one solution it's multiple different solutions coming together that the presentation has also shown I'm waiting for any final comments otherwise we will start wrapping the webinar up first of all thank you a lot of good comments in the chat a lot of nice discussion about the role of teachers the role of schools and the resources could say also some comments at the resources might be the biggest issue as well I hope you can still continue on the discussion after this webinar we're recording this so we've shared this recording and we've shared the slides afterwards and then to end this webinar are there any final comments from Kirsten or Pasi any final remarks you would like to make just to say that there is some further information about the schools approach and about the pastoral tracking programme along with the video on the schools toolkit the European schools toolkit so they can download some further details from there and there will also be some further details on the school website if they wanted to look we've only been able to give you a very short idea because it's a very complex system that the communication academy and the family zone have been able to develop so there are plenty of places that you could find out more if I could just say we do have visitors from all over the world and the doors are always open to come and have a much longer time and to talk and to have a look around