Agenda and minutes

Please introduce yourselves and outline your roles and responsibilities.

(WC) I am the principal of Homewood School and Sixth Form Centre, which is a comprehensive school of some 2,100 students aged between 11 and 18. The school has a large catchment area of approx 150 km.  The curriculum we follow offers opportunities for as wide a range of abilities as possible.  It is important to us that the school is not seen as a building which is used just between 9.00am and 3.30pm.  We are a ’50 week a year’ school, and work on the very simple principal that we must not restrict the use of the many resources we have at the school, but must use them for the good of the community.  We are already well established with the government’s core offer which will come in in September 2010, and our school has won national awards.

(JS)  I have been the Director of Extended Services since 1999 and I am responsible for Extended Services provision within school and the delivery of the core offer.  I have responsibility for anything outside the classroom, including trips and visits, family liaison, the library and media centre. I am also involved in work on the Children’s University and the QES advanced recognition qualification.

In your experience, what are the main advantages and benefits, if any, resulting from the provision of Extended Services?  Which of the Extended Services offered by the Centre are proving to have the greatest impact and benefit for the community?

(WC) Learning is at the heart of the community so does not stop.  I see benefits in the way students engage as we are able to engage their interests. Learning starts early, in the nursery, and is not necessarily something which happens in the classroom, or leads to a qualification.  The ‘soft’ aspects of learning are very important in generating a commitment to learning.  Homewood is a designated Arts college with a theatre facility, and many people come to our site to use it.  We also have professional teaching kitchens, and the public can attend for an evening to see a theatre performance and to have a meal.  This gives an attractive service to the community as well as training our students.

(JS)  We are fortunate to have huge resources on a 45 acre site with many buildings, and we have developed this over the years with community use in mind.  We offer childcare facilities on site 5 days a week, and members of the community can use our library and dance studios or see a show and have a meal. We offer sports activities for the public after school, in the evenings, Saturdays and school holidays.  We have a school farm, which is open to our  local Primary Schools.  Our ethos is to use the resources we have to the best of our ability, from 7.00 am to 10.00 pm, 6 days per week for 51 weeks a year.

Are there any groups of people in the local  ...  view the full minutes text for item 15.

Please introduce yourself and outline your role and responsibilities.

I am the Strategic Director of Every Child Matters at Highworth Grammar School, which is largely a girls’ school but now has a mixed sixth form.  As well as the ECM Director, I am also the school’s Child Protection officer, I oversee attendance, the Healthy Schools initiative, Extended Services and I also teach.  At the moment we are looking at where we are up to with Extended Services, what is happening and what we can provide.

Please outline the Extended Services that Highworth Grammar Schooloffers, and how these services are structured and delivered.

The school is open from 8.00 am to 6.00 pm, so we are already providing wrap-around care.  Children can attend from 7.30 am and a breakfast service is available from 8.00 to 8.30 am. We do not offer clubs before school but we do have supervised activities.  After school clubs, like ICT, dance and drama, run up to 6.00 pm. A list of clubs available was left with the Select Committee.

Highworth is part of the Kent Music School, and we run some music activities with the community.  The Ashford Orchestral Players meet in our school hall once a week, and we host a choir, a wind band, a folk band (which is run by the community) and a barbershop group. All this is in addition to the regular music teaching and activities that we have in the school. 

We also have a number of outside users who hire our premises for activities, including the KUMON maths and English service which runs from 4.00 to 6.00 pm twice a week.  Until recently, we had Nepalese adults learning ‘English as a Foreign Language’, but the participation rates dropped and it was discontinued.  Soon we will have ‘Understanding Your Teenager’, run by an external tutor and arranged by our Extended Services Development Manager.  There is a break dancing summer school coming up which will be the culmination of a project to mentor and work with local primary schools to teach them break dancing.  It is hoped that this summer school will attract 60 students aged between 10 and 18.

In your view, are there any groups of people in the local community who find it particularly difficult to access Extended Services?  If so, what can be done to help them access these services?

Several local schools specialise in particular subjects; Highworth has music, the North School  has sports and The Towers has business studies, so that tends to shape the audience which is attracted to each.  Some areas of the community would be ‘hard to reach’ due to language barriers, disability, age and geographical location.  We found that the Nepalese community were hard to attract and we did not get as many as we had hoped for the English language classes.  We sent home a letter, written in English, with the pupils, but even if the letter had been translated into Nepalese, they might not have come.  ...  view the full minutes text for item 16.

Please introduce yourself and outline your role and responsibilities.

I am the Head Teacher of the Foreland School, where I have taught for 20 years. I oversee Extended Services at the school, although I am not involved in the detail of delivering it.  It is an exciting project. One of my teaching staff has a watching brief over our Extended Services provision.  I am on the strategic leadership group of Quartet.  The Foreland School has links to Margate, and under Building Schools for the Future there are plans to rebuild the school in conjunction with Hartsdown Technical College.

What Extended Services does the Foreland School offer, and how are these services planned and delivered?

As a special school, I feel we are a bit behind the mainstream schools. We were the last one locally to start a breakfast club.  We do much liaison and multi-agency working with physiotherapy, OT, etc, and we have speech therapy at the school every day.  We also work a lot with parents.  My philosophy is to look at the whole child, which is a strength of special schools. Our biggest classes have only 10 or 12 children in them, so we can have a closer relationship with each child and their parents.

We continue forward with joint planning work with the NHS and other partners, and our aim is to support parents as much as possible. We work with the Family Intervention and Support Service (FISS) more each year, at the Smile Centre, which offers outreach services to mainstream schools (50 of our children have Special Educational Needs).  My philosophy as a teacher is to support the whole school together.  The FISS gives training for teachers and courses for families in behaviour management, and aspects of coping with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. They also give access to sleep clinics, which is a new initiative as good sleep has been identified as an important help to a child‘s behaviour.  We also use Makaton signing.

We run traditional after school and breakfast clubs, which attracted small numbers at first.  The age range we cover is 2 to 19, so there is a challenge in how to offer such clubs.  We have a wide range of abilities, from profoundly disabled to more able-bodied children, and provision for such a broad range is challenging and expensive.  After main school hours, there are fewer staff around to help with those children who have behavioural difficulties.  As I have some funding for this via Extended Services, I have tried to open the after-school clubs to the whole school, except the nursery children.  We run mixed-age clubs offering sports and crafts, and we also use our sensory room.  We ran these clubs to see how they would go, and there have been fewer problems than I had expected.  There are 8 children in each club, with 5 staff to run each.  We run two clubs per term, each running for four weeks, and we have not yet had to turn  ...  view the full minutes text for item 17.