Agenda item

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 away any child who has wanted to take part. 

Out of 140 children in the school, most must have benefitted from our Extended Services provision in some way.  Parents and children have been keen to stay on after school together.

In your view, what are the main economic, legal, social and operational challenges – if any – for the school, when providing Extended Services (for example, with regard to transport, staffing and attendance), and how can these challenges be resolved?

Transport for our children is expensive and needs to be very particular to accommodate their individual needs. Most come to school in taxis and buses. Some of those with very complex needs have their own transport, but most are ferried to and fro by public transport.  We have to stipulate that, if they want to stay for a club, their parents must come and collect them afterwards.  Some very local children cannot attend after school if their parents do not have their own vehicle and cannot afford a local taxi.  Public transport services to the Foreland School are not good.  We have used some of our Your Choice funding to fund travel so some children could attend after-school clubs.  We have two school minibuses which are unused at the end of the day, so we could pay a driver and use those to run children home after clubs.

In which ways, if any, might the reduction of Government funding for Extended Services in future years affect the Extended Services the Foreland School provides?

Our core services will continue but the out-of-hours activities will not be able to.  Some of our activities do not actually cost much to run but they take time and energy and need ideas and creativity.  The Extended Services Development Manager who works with the Quartet spends time putting together bids and developing links.  One of my staff works on our Extended Services provision but we would need more staff time to do more.  Having a Family Liaison Officer (FLO) would be good but I would have to sacrifice a teaching assistant post to get one, and they are vital.

Has your Extended Services Development Manager been successful in the past, in the bids she has put forward?

Yes, so this would simply not be possible without her.  Her work has brought much benefit to the school, and we have added in a little money ourselves.

In your opinion, how can Kent County Council, together with schools and other providers of Eextended Services, ensure the sustainability of Extended Services into the future?

It is difficult to see how things would happen if there were no funding. Some projects or clubs could possibly be run on a voluntary basis, but for this we would have to reply so much on goodwill. The level of responsibility one would be taking on with children with specialised needs would put people off taking on this sort of work, and volunteers would still need to go through stringent CRB checks and training, etc.

A parents’ support group meets every other week in the school and uses the school’s facilities.  In the past they have hired a bouncy castle.  This sort of activity is easier and cheaper to run as parents are taking on the responsibility for their own children, and I am happy for the facilities in the school to be used in this way. 

Weekend activities raise too many difficulties around getting staff to sign up to run them.  Some staff are keen to do weekend activities and have set up a scheme in conjunction with the local RNID school.  All this takes money to set up, though, so if the money goes away we could not continue.

In your view, in which ways, if any, can Kent County Council, schools and external partners improve the general provision of Extended Services? Might you establish a link like the one which exists between St Nicholas Special School and Canterbury Christ Church University, perhaps with Thanet College?

Yes, we already do have a link, one day a week.

Would you consider developing this further?

I am not sure, as only 20 – 30% of our students have a level of ability that allows them to take advantage of this link.  We are not placed in the college site as St Nicholas is. Thanet is one area which is being considered for a Multi-Agency Service Hub (MASH), which will be near Garlinge and Hartsdown.  We already share our school site with the NHS as the NHS owns it. Planning services together more in the future would help.

Do you offer courses which are not SEN-orientated, and activities which are open to/attractive to anyone?

Adults with Special Educational Needs (SEN) receive a Direct Payment with which they can purchase services, but they would need to have access to services which they could purchase with it. Other people can use the sensory room when the school is not using it, and use of this facility could increase.  The new school, when built, will be a PFI project, so I expect will have to charge for the use of its premises, but I don’t know if this charge will be prohibitive for some potential users. At the moment we make a charge but it is very small.  Our after school activities are not geared to SEN per se; they are just regular subjects like arts, sports, music, etc.

Do you signpost people to other local services?

Yes, we do a lot of signposting within the Quartet group, and send out fliers for each other’s services and activities.  I feel our school buildings are under-used.

Do you try to involve adults with SEN in using other schools or facilities in the Quartet?

I would like to but the transport links are really not good. To make more use of our school premises, we would have to cover the cost of the caretaker and the heating, etc. The new school will have better facilities and we will seek to use this more for the community. 

Adult literacy in Thanet is a big issue. We have 70 - 80 learning support assistants in our school, and we aim to get them all to level 3 or 4 of the Support When in Schools(SWIS) standard.  Some parents struggle with adult literacy but it is a difficult issue to address as such classes are difficult to promote.

If there were no Extended Services Development Managers, what would happen to you Extended Services provision?

Many things would fall apart.  I hope some models that we have already established would continue, but we would lose the strategic overview that our Extended Services Development Manager has.  We will have to either stop the breakfast clubs when the money ends or start to charge the children for using them, at which point some will not be able to continue attending.  I know that many breakfast clubs have stopped when they could no longer be provided free of charge.

In its report, the Select Committee would like to include some quotes from users of Extended Services to illustrate the value and benefits of it.  Please could you provide some quotes?

We also need do illustrate the effects that reducing the Extended Services Development Manager level will have on Extended Services provision. Would one Extended Services Development Manager be able to cover two areas, perhaps?

Well, I think having someone will be better than no-one at all, but I would caution against spreading the service too thin.  One person covering two or more areas might still be able to maintain the strategic overview that they have now but they would not have time to get practically involved in provision.

Is there a role for voluntary bodies in Extended Services provision?  Might this involvement be difficult with SEN?

We work closely with MENCAP locally.  They have a representative on our Governing body, and we share ideas and expertise.  We signpost people to the local Autistic Society, and they do use our school premises sometimes.  But these are not new relationships; we have established these over many years.

Is there pressure on your staff to volunteer more?

I could ask them to volunteer more to help support after-school activities, but they would not stand for it as they have a clear job description and this is not included in it!

Could you share your school minibuses with other schools or the public, to help people access Extended Services events across the Thanet area?

This could work.  I would need to look into this sort of resource sharing and the practicalities of doing this.  Everything takes time and needs admin support to set up.

What about taking all the Extended Services activity of your and other local schools and handing it all over to be managed by an external lettings company?

This sounds super!  The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) school should plan this in from the start!