Agenda and minutes

Please introduce yourself and outline the responsibilities that your post involves.

I am the Director of YPSA, which I set up in March 2010.  The aim is to help schools to meet their pledge of providing five hours of physical education for every pupil each week, and to help them deliver wrap-around education.  YPSA helps them set up breakfast clubs and lunchtime and after-school activities.  YPSA aims to support a school to provide these services in their own format and in a programme with which they are happy, and we work with them to establish this package.  Many schools are under pressure to provide more PE, and many teacher training courses simply do not include sufficient PE training.

My background is in physical education.  Previously I have been a PE specialist and a PE consultant, and have a Masters degree in sports management.  My business partner and I hire ourselves out to help schools.

Please outline the Extended Services that the Young Persons’ Sports Academy offers, and how these services are structured, commissioned and delivered. Can you give an example of the sort of schools you work with, and how much you charge for your service?

We had hoped to be working with two schools by this summer, but we found a greater need than we expected and we are currently working with four schools, and I will start working with a fifth this afternoon.  We have eight coaches on our books.  We work with a Community School, at which I have a coach who is now settling in to run their breakfast club from 8.00 to 9.00 am daily.  Once we have started a new working relationship and placed a coach in a school, I go back to visit and appraise the set-up.  We have an ongoing monitoring role. 

The costs to us of setting up a new placement include the costs of CRB checks on each of our coaches, and we have liability insurance of £5 million, which we are required to have.  We charge a school £30 per hour for our services.

What type of working relationship exists between the Young Persons’ Sports Academy and Kent County Council?  How would you like to see this relationship develop into the future?  In which ways – if any – can collaboration and partnership working between all organisations involved in providing Extended Services in the County be improved?

I was introduced to Emma Jenkins and have had brilliant support, advice and help from her.  I was able to share some of my contacts with her team, so the relationship has been reciprocal and it has been an ideal platform for me to work from.  I found that Emma had incorporated my logo into an Extended Services best practice document, which I now use as a working document for my company.   I have also worked with the Kent Sports Development Unit (KSDU).  I have a good partnership with the KCC, and this link has been commented on in a recent  ...  view the full minutes text for item 18.

Please introduce yourself and describe the role and responsibilities that your position as School Parent Governor involves.

I trained as a solicitor and worked for many years in this profession but then gave up full-time work to be a carer for my son, who is profoundly disabled and attends Valence School. I have served as a School Governor since 1996.  I am currently the Chair of the Teaching and Learning Committee at Valence School, and, amongst other commercial legal issues, act as a consultant on Disability Discrimination Act matters for the John Lewis Partnership (for whom I used to work as the Commercial Solicitor). 

Please outline the Extended Services that Valence School – at which you are the Chair of the Teaching and Learning Committee - offers to its pupils and to the local community. 

We can offer pupils a broad range of services:-

• a ‘one stop shop’ for healthcare, including physiotherapy, speech and language therapy and occupational therapy;
• wheelchair provision, repairs and servicing;
• consultants from London hospitals come to Valence for appointments with pupils, as do dentists, optometrists and GPs (for the boarding pupils);
• we have a specialist teacher for support services, and an AAC department;
• we have after-school clubs and activities in the evenings and at weekends, which can be accessed by boarders and day pupils;
• we have recently been awarded Sports College status, and operate two Kent Sports academies to help pupils who have been identified as having particular sport skills.

However, we would love to be able to offer this same range of services to the local community, but we have had less than positive engagement and we currently provide no services at all to the local community.

Why do you think this is?

I think there are several reasons, including inertia in the community - although, as part of our Sports College status, we have a duty to engage the community and share our facilities.  We approached the local GPs’ surgeries to link to people who could benefit from our ‘one stop shop’ healthcare services, and we also have a well-equipped gym, but all our attempts to engage have failed. Maybe this is because people have a mental block as it’s a ‘special’ school and they don’t see it as being relevant to them. Other factors may be the demographics of the local area and the fact that the school site is relatively isolated, being set in some 47 acres of countryside.

In your experience, what are the benefits - if any - that Extended Services bring to pupils and to the local community?

Having London consultants visit the school means that pupils do not have to take time away from study to attend an appointment in London, parents do not have to take time off work to accompany them, and families are spared the travels costs and the physical difficulties of making a journey by public transport with a profoundly disabled child.  The school has twelve pupils with muscular dystrophy who  ...  view the full minutes text for item 19.

Please introduce yourselves and describe your roles and the responsibilities that your positions involve.

(ER)  I am the Chair of Governors at Harrietsham Primary School, near Maidstone.  I have been involved in the National Teaching Awards since 2008 and am now a judge of the competition.

(JK)  I am the Chair of the Kent Governors’ Association (KGA) as well as the Chair of Governors at Headcorn Primary School.  I am also an area-appointed District Governor at Parkwood School in Maidstone, which had been given a ‘notice to improve’ and has since moved on successfully.  As the Chair of the Kent Governors’ Association, I attend the Annual and South East regional meetings of the National Governors’ Association.  I think this is an important link to keep up, as the national feedback is very helpful.

Please outline the Extended Services that Headcorn Primary School and Harrietsham Primary School offer to their pupils and to the local community. 

(ER) At Harrietsham, we started a breakfast club. Initially, we investigated using Surestart funding to establish it, however we decided instead to fund it and run it ourselves.  We run an after-school club via Kent Play Clubs, for which we did surveys and needs assessments to guide the setting of realistic fees.  Harrietsham hosts a French language school on Saturdays and a summer play scheme as well as several school-run activity clubs.  The Governing body funded the breakfast club, as, from our questionnaires, we knew there was a big need for it, and we have staff who are willing to run it.  We fundraised the £1,500 needed to establish it.

(JK)  At Headcorn, we signpost to a breakfast club in the village, which is held in a local Montessori school and is very well attended.  The people who run it escort our children who attend it from their school to ours, as many parents who live in Headcorn are commuters who are not available to accompany their children to school.  We have sports clubs, dance and drama clubs, after- school activities and a French club, so our activities are spread through the school day as well as after it.  Every evening, the school premises are used for some activity like a gym club or Brownies.  We provide the facilities for and host the summer play scheme.  The local Extended Services Co-ordinator is resident at our school and serves other schools too, so we gain links that way.

In your view, who benefits the most from the provision of Extended Services?  Are there any particular groups of pupils and of Kent residents who find it more difficult to access Extended Services?  If so, why?

(JK) Some people have to travel through rural areas to our site, but this seems to cause no problem with attendance at any event. At one time it was possible that our site would be used as a children’s centre, but this is not run from our site. In the Every Child Matters agenda, a priority  ...  view the full minutes text for item 20.