Agenda item

Please introduce yourself and outline your role and responsibilities.

I am the Head Teacher of Holy Trinity and St John‘s Primary School in Margate.  We are a through Primary School with two-form entry plus a nursery, and we have between 400 and 450 pupils.  We are in central Margate and our index of multiple deprivation is 2.

Please outline the Extended Services Holy Trinity and St John's Primary School offers, and the ways these services are structured and delivered.

We have what I call the ‘traditional’ school clubs before and after-school, including chess, table tennis, football and music.  We also have a breakfast club which is free and used by 50 pupils.  All these activities are staffed by Members of the school staff.  A few of the after-school clubs engage parents, and we have a link to Charlton Athletic.  We are part of the Quartet Group and we aim our activities at increasing families’ quality time to broaden their opportunities.  For instance, a group outing to the cinema or a trip to London are big adventures for our pupils.   These activities attract a good mix of families.  We also have an allotment club, run cooking classes, a holiday club run by the Family Liaison Officer (of which I have 1½!), we host adult learning, coffee mornings and pastoral care.

In your experience, what are the main benefits resulting from the provision of Extended Services?

The main ones are that it plugs gaps and gives opportunities for our pupils to enjoy things that other children enjoy.  It offers opportunities that their families might not have thought of.  It could mean that school for them isn’t just about English and maths but also about animation or table tennis. The breakfast club helps our attendance figures, and the football club in the morning means that pupils arrive for the start of lessons on time!  A child being on site before the start of lessons gives them the chance to talk to a member of staff about a problem and resolve an anxiety so they are then able to relax and concentrate on lessons, so increasing their performance in class.  Extended Services also increases the level of general engagement with local families.

Does the School offer activities for the local community in the evenings and holidays?  If so, how are these activities managed in the school, and by whom?

Yes, a local church uses the school premises for meetings on Sundays, and there are also clubs which do karate and several different types of dancing. A group which looks after a local cemetery also use the school regularly.  I feel this is a waste of our resources and it is a pity that the school facilities are not used more but I don’t know how to use the school better.  We have employed a lettings manager for the past 3 or 4 years, who also does the gardening, as the caretaker does not necessarily want the additional hours to cover lettings. A post covering solely the lettings manager function would be difficult to advertise and would have to be self-funding. The post and the income are mutually dependent, with the club lettings gathering income to fund the post and the presence of the post allowing the clubs to exist.

What are the daily opening hours of your school?

We start pre-school clubs at 8.00 am, then have the main school day up to 4.00 or 4.30 pm, then have evening clubs running from 7.00 until 9.00 pm.

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

There are no practical difficulties that I can think of, but some parents just do not think it will benefit their child.  Some Eastern European pupils were not joining in so were asked what clubs they would like. They chose a multi-sports club as it would be run by a Czech member of staff.  We already had a multi-sports club at the time but they had not joined it as they did not feel personally engaged with it.

Was this because of language or cultural problems, do you think?

I don’t know, maybe it was because they felt special when they were asked as a group what they wanted.

Some children cannot afford activities which are beyond school, like ballet, for example, but could access subsidised or free school clubs.  I have access to Your Choice subsidy but the difficulty is that I have to make a decision about where to allocate it.

In your view, what are the main economic, legal, social and operational challenges for the School – if any – when providing Extended Services?

I feel that anyone who wants to take part in Extended Services should be able to. Operational challenges would include the presence of the caretaker or lettings manager. Practical challenges include security, safeguarding, layout of rooms (ie the hassle of a teacher having to set up their room for class in the morning if the tables have been left in the wrong place by a hirer the night before).  Extended Services does rely on the goodwill of staff [and most are happy to do it] but assumes that they will want additional hours, which some might not necessarily.  Relying just on goodwill might mean that if a particular teacher was not available one evening, a club could not go ahead.  I have an uncertainty sometimes about how to spend my budget, and there are grey areas in which I am not sure if something counts as legitimate expenditure.  For instance, something which helps the local community does not increase the maths performance at my school, and Ofsted seems to lack a long-term view of this sort of issue.

Isn’t Extended Services funding ring-fenced?

Some is, but it is not clear-cut.  For instance, we do not charge for the breakfast club as this helps prepare the children to be ready to learn.  Some after-school clubs in the past have ended due to lack of numbers.  The set up for getting funding is very bureaucratic, and there are some things which schools might not be aware of. For instance, for after-school clubs we have to have different policies. ‘Childcare’ and ‘school care of a child’ are different things and have different regulations. Ofsted came to inspect and asked to see our written policy for ‘left and uncollected children’, which it turned out we needed to have for our after-schools clubs as we charge for them. If you need funding to set up an activity quickly, which we did, the system makes this very difficult to do, and we started to wonder if it was worth it. 

The Ofsted assessment framework looks at community involvement. How far is this taken into account by schools when preparing for assessment?

We do take account of it, but the academic attainment of our pupils is still the key factor in the score that we get.  If our Extended Services was brilliant but our attainment poor, we would score low.  Likewise, if our attainment was very good but we did no Extended Services at all, we would be marked down for that.

In which ways, if any, might the reduction of Government funding for Extended Services in future years, and the current restructuring of the KCC CFE Directorate, affect the Extended Services that Holy Trinity and St John's provides?

Without the presence of an Extended Services Development Manager (ESDM), I fear the school will be overstretched to meet the requirements of delivering Extended Services, and I fear that the Quartet project will not be able to carry on. The ESDM helps to co-ordinate and facilitate services and is a big role which is highly valued in the community.  Looking ahead at the budget, funding for the Thanet Excellence cluster, which has helped to fund our Extended Services, ends in April 2011, so we will suffer double cuts and I don’t know how we could recoup this.  We would have to take a decision about possibly charging for some things we give free now, like the breakfast club, or cut back on the Extended Services bits first.  Parents come to value these activities and then they are suddenly taken away.

Can you comment on a voluntary or paid lettings manager, perhaps an enhanced role for the Family Liaison Officer (FLO), and the effect on the affordability of services? Would parents take a child away from an after-school club if they could not pay for it?

I sit on a Primary Head Teachers forum, and I know that FLOs are often asked to take on work which might otherwise be done by a Social Worker, so the FLO already has a huge workload and couldn’t take on any more. They work with some of the most difficult families, and I think their salary just does not cover what they actually do. The Attendance Officer at my school is also doing some FLO work, so that’s why I said at the start that I had 1½ FLOs!

In your view, in which ways, if any, can Kent County Council, schools and external partners, improve the general provision of Extended Services?

• They could clarify some of the grey areas around what the school budget should be used for. With ES, it is important to target resources to the people who most need it, but this is difficult to do.  With Your Choice funding I have the scope to make this decision, but I don’t like to be the one making it.

• Proper recognition of the FLO role would help. 

• Bureaucracy and red tape could be reduced. For example, I have a teaching assistant who has a degree in ceramics and she wanted to set up a ceramics club.  She wanted to be paid for it, as she is using her degree, and I wanted to pay her for it, but because she is an existing member of staff it was complicated.  It would have been more straightforward to engage an external provider.

• Safeguarding responsibilities need clarification. Parents don’t differentiate between an activity at the school which is run by the school and one which is run by an external provider, and if something were to happen at an out of hours club it would be difficult to see clearly, and help parents to understand, who has the responsibility for safeguarding in that situation.

• I feel schools are the driving force and the staff bear the brunt of Extended Services service provision. If there were a team which could set up and guarantee capacity for a minimum of so many club sessions a year, the school could then pay for and add on other sessions if it wished.

Could several schools be linked together for the purpose of paying someone to manage their lettings?

Yes, that would make sense as it would make a viable job for someone, whereas at one school it would not be cost effective.

Would Extended Services implode if the ESDM posts were removed?  What if several areas were combined under one ESDM, to save money?

It would give schools peace of mind that someone had an overview of the issue and could give advice about best practice from a broader experience.  Without an ESDM, schools would continue to do Extended Services but it would be very difficult on their own.

Do you have a problem engaging parents, and how do you do it?

This is big problem.  We have an annual parental questionnaire, and we have to offer a £25 prize to encourage parents to fill it in and return it. Although 80% of parents come to parents’ evenings, they do not come to ‘Awareness of Maths’ sessions. They do come to a card making club which is run by the  FLO, and this is helpful as they can chat in a relaxed atmosphere while making cards.  They would not come along to a meeting on bullying, for example, but issues like this can be brought up in conversation at an informal setting like a card making club or a football match.  You have to try all the options to engage parents.

Is Extended Services take-up related to areas of deprivation?

Yes, I think so. Families get fed up with being preached at, so it is important to put the message across in the right way.  They need to see the worth of going to school, and having an interest in the choir or a club helps that.

Some schools have embraced the Extended Services concept and some haven’t.  Why do you think some don’t do it?

Some might be envious of my funding, being in a deprived area (ie the fact that I can have a lettings manager).  Some feel that school is not about childcare and clubs, and that families should find activities for themselves.

What is your Governors’ commitment to Extended Services?

We do involve our Governors in what we are doing for Extended Servicesand they are very supportive of it. They are local people who know local needs and want to see benefits for the local area.

What is your view on having volunteers to cover activities if you cannot pay to cover them? Are there any formal voluntary bodies you can turn to, and could their role be extended?

No, I haven’t got any formal voluntary bodies that I work with, but we have informal volunteering. We have a volunteer reading group but that is seen as part of the curriculum.

Because people are used to traditional school opening hours being 8.30 to 5.00 and school sites being closed at the weekends and in the school holidays, I think many people don’t think to ask to use the school premises for their club or activity.  We have to get people used to a new culture of schools being more open.

Would a simplified safeguarding guidance document, giving do and don’ts, help schools to understand KCC’s safeguarding policy and take away some of the anxieties?

Yes, that would help.