Agenda item

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 community who, in your view, find it particularly difficult to access Extended Services?  If so, what can be done to help them access these services?

(WC)  Our rural location in Tenterden (which has a population of just over 7,000) means that transport is an issue, but we counteract that by taking activities to villages.  Our school ethos is to open up everything, but not necessarily on the school site. Finance is a restriction, and we have insufficient resources to do what we really want to do – for instance, we want to do an activity in each of 40 local Primary schools, but our resources inhibit this.  Rural transport is always an issue in an area like ours.  Also, we work to  change the public’s understanding of what a school is, and to encourage them to access our resources.

(JS) In 2002, we started offering IT training for our local mums.  We offered minibus transport and childcare facilities, but this all has costs.  The Freedom Pass has been brilliant as students can travel to take part in activities, or stay at the school after the usual home time.

In your view, what are the main economic, legal, social and operational challenges for the school – if any – when providing Extended Services, and how can these be resolved?

(WC) The economies of scale of being a large school help, but we need to pay overtime for the caretaker, and generate income to pay for the activities.  There is no shortage of opportunities but we always have to cover the costs.  If money for Extended Services were to run out, we could not draw on our core funding to carry on with Extended Services.  This is a real economic concern for us.  We are very creative in the way in which we use our resources; we do not seek to make a profit but we do need to break even.  Health and Safety issues are a real concern, and people using our premises have expectations over and above what we do day to day.  Some people are scared of litigation issues if things go wrong, so do not offer to take on an outing or a class.

Would a simplified version of the KCC safeguarding policy help?

(WC) We do use the KCC safeguarding policy as a basis for our own policy, but this does not necessarily take away people’s anxiety.

(JS) Operationally, providing Extended Services means running a second ‘school’ alongside Homewood school. It is relatively easy to close a school a bad weather, and advertise the closure using the media, but to close an extended school is a nightmare as there are so many more people involved and we do not have the same communication ‘links’ to them that we have to our students and their parents.  Running Extended Services requires a different set of skills – risk assessment, understanding a different set of Health and Safety issues.  There is also pressure on school staff to deliver the extra services.

As a large rural school, are there any particular issues Homewood is faced with when providing Extended Services?  If so, in your opinion, how can the local authority support the school?

(WC) To address the rural issue, additional resources would be needed.  There is willingness and commitment to Extended Services already there, but it is important to recognise that Kent has large rural areas which must be adequately served by transport.  It is far better to allow activities to continue in the locations where they have evolved and settled rather than to pull them all together in one place and require people to travel to access them.

In which ways, if any, might the reduction in Government funding for Extended Services in future years, and the current restructuring of the KCC Education Directorate, affect the Extended Services the school provides?

(WC) Most of the Extended Services that we do is achieved from our own resources.  There is some local authority money but it is ring-fenced and goes straight out again.  I want to see recognition that Extended Services is the way forward for the 21^st century, but it is vital that it is properly funded.  If it is not adequately funded, it will contract and shrink away.  Any reduction in funding must be very carefully managed.

(JS)  Our Extended Services Development Manager (ESDM) has known and worked with the school for 8 years, and has an overview of the needs of the schools in her area which are delivering Extended Services, so if the ESDM post were deleted we would lose this vital link and support.

(WC) In the current economic climate, with serious levels of national debt, all parties will seek to protect core provision.  However, peripheral grant funding will be reduced and much Extended Services provision will be endangered.  My greatest fear is the shrinkage of Extended Services provision, so the KCC would need to assess what is needed and how this can be funded, to help Extended Services to survive.

As a community school in a rural area, how far is Homewood’s Extended Services provision affected by the travel patterns of pupils, ie pupils being bussed to school and then home again en masse?

(WC) This is a significant restriction on what we can run before or after school.  There are some bus services across the rural area, but not serving the smallest and most remote areas, so pupils’ ability to stay on to after-school clubs relies on parents being able to pick up their own child and offer others a lift home.  Our after-school Extended Services provision relies on a network of parents with their own transport.  You cannot encourage pupils to take part in Extended Services unless there is transport available which allows them to take it up.

We have considered the possibility of a three-part day, in which different cohorts of pupils attend school at different times of the day.  This would extend the available time in the day for us to run Extended Services activities, but we would need to be able to staff the school at different times of the day.  Perhaps if sufficient numbers of pupils were travelling at particular times of day, a local bus company might be persuaded to come on board and run a service to support flexible times, but we would need resources up front to kick- start it.

If government funding were to be restricted to core services only, you would need to be able to demonstrate that Extended Services contributes to the delivery of those core services and should continue to be funded.  The trick would be how you measure the effect that Extended Services has on the deliver of core services.

To what extent can voluntary bodies help with Extended Services delivery, and can IT help with the problem of reaching pupils and communities in the most rural areas?

(JS) Voluntary bodies tend to be involved more in Primary Schools. We work with Tenterden Youth Service, which has many resources and much expertise.

Our latest project is the ‘Homewood Hairy Bikers’. A local motorbike training school will provide motorcycle maintenance classes for our teenagers and adult learners and students in return for free hire of the school grounds.  We now have the resources to accommodate this activity.  This will  help our students who ride motorbikes to school  learn useful motorbike riding skills and  safety tips. 

This formed a ‘bartering’ partnership which benefited both the training company and the school and its wider community.  Our ESDM was key to setting this up.

Would you say that the key to Extended Services is an attitude - if you want to provide it you will find a way of doing it?

(JS)  Yes, it’s a belief, we take risks and find the challenges enjoyable.

If a Head Teacher were not enthusiastic about Extended Services and wanted to do the bare minimum, how would you overcome this?

(JS) It has always been our philosophy that, as a community school, we should offer our resources to our community. We have been offering Extended Services for 10 years, before it was even called Extended Services!  The school has a very strong philosophy about the value of this, so we couldn’t, and wouldn’t want to, stop offering Extended Services.

(WC)  If a new Head Teacher were being appointed, the Governors at Homewood would not choose anyone who did not embrace Extended Services.  Due to the impact of modern society, a learner in the 21^st century thinks in a very different way and needs a very different model of tuition, using new and rapidly-changing technology.

What would you say is the overall value of Extended Services? When the Select Committee produces its report, it would like to include some quotes from users who have benefitted from Extended Services, to show the value of it.

(WC) It is a good idea to ask for evidence of the benefits of Extended Services but it is difficult to identify.  You could say that a happy learner is an engaged learner, but how do you quantify this?

Can you say more about how the deletion of the ESDM posts would affect your ability to deliver Extended Services?

(WC) If I could afford to, I would employ an ESDM, but I can’t fund this. The ESDM has built up expertise over years, and it would be difficult to replicate the relationship and level of understanding that we have with them. The demise of this role would be a great loss to this and other schools.  My main concern is that the next generation of learners will miss out on what the ESDM role has been able to contribute.  The long term future effect of the change will be felt in 5 to 10 years’ time.  You’d need to go back to the basic question: ‘what is learning about, for young people and the community?’

How could you extend you involvement with commercial partners?

(WC) There are two types of partners; Sport England, SEEDA, etc, who provide pots of funding; and far-sighted commercial enterprises who want to put something back into the local community.  These are willing to work with us to build a relationship and develop mutual respect.  We have linked to theatre companies and both benefitted. You have to recognise that there are people out there who are willing to go into this sort of deal. However, you need someone to make the initial links and introductions, and this is where the ESDM role helps.

You say you started to deliver the Extended Services core offer years ago. How did you deliver the core offer of Extended Services, before this started to be funded, and how separate was it to your core services?

(WC) The core offer does not relate just to exam results.  Exams are a passport to other things, but you need to look beyond that to what other things young people want and need in terms of life skills. We need to address this in whichever way we can – using core services, Extended Services and whatever. Extended Services helps to address this need, and if you let go of Extended Services you do no favours to young people going out into society.  There are already enough pressures in society for young people to contend with.  Also, young people are not the only learners, and the community needs access to learning too.  It’s about young and old.  We are involved in a wonderful project with the Kent Tenterden Steam Railway, which has engaged some of our pupils alongside older volunteers in renovating an historic truck.  You wouldn’t think it would appeal to teenagers to work with retired people on vehicles which ran generations before their time, but it does, and they are really enjoying it. If you take away Extended Services, you lose so many ways of linking the community.

Can you suggest any more solutions to improving the provision of Extended Services?

(WC) Don’t delete the ESDM posts; recognise that Extended Services is not just about schools, but about the philosophy of learning and how we address this in society; and address the issue of budgets being ring-fenced.  Schools would benefit from having flexibility over how they allocate funding.

How would you feel about handing over your facilities and lettings to be managed by an external commercial company?

(WC)  We contracted out all our cleaning, which is worth about £200,000 per annum, and while this works with cleaning, I am not sure it would work as well with Extended Services provision.  It might work in terms of the practical details, but whoever were doing it would have to be immersed in the philosophy of what we do to be able to deliver the whole service. We don’t have profit margins to take into account with what we do, but commercial providers do have.

(JS)  Having won a Quality Mark in Extended Services, this shows to our current and future partners that we are rigorous in what we do. We are currently seeking to make Homewood one of the three hubs in Kent for  the Children’s University, and we will be actively involved in the management of provision

A previous interviewee has told the Committee about the Dover Extended Services (DES) model.  Do you think this sort of model would be useful in helping to promote Extended Services to schools which do not yet do it?

(WC/JS)  Yes, this would help schools and show future partners that a school using this model is offering a quality service.

(WC) Thinking about the Quality Mark accreditation, I would urge the local authority to consider two questions; are all schools meeting the provision they are due to meet by 2011,and does Extended Services genuinely impact upon the school?