Agenda item

Please introduce yourself and describe your role and responsibilities.

I am based in Hythe and work as a consultant in the Shepway area.  My role links education with work, and I work very closely with Secondary schools.  I have been involved in running skills fairs for the last three years, at which it is usual to get 95 stands and some 12,000 student attendees. I also sit on education-based committees.  I am not involved in (or interested in!) the politics around careers advice and school/work links; I am someone who wants to be involved in doing things!

I work as a part-time lecturer at K College in Ashford, and this regular contact with students helps me understand their needs.  I meet some very needy, vulnerable students who come from deprived backgrounds and who desperately need help to build their confidence, so pastoral care and support is very important. I find that progress with these students is made up of many ‘small wins’. Something as simple as a smiley face on a good piece of work can help build confidence.

Yes, the Committee is finding out that pastoral care is an important part of what we need to look at.

With students like the ones I describe, you need to start from ‘I can’t …’ and nurture and train them to build their confidence. It would be helpful to have a mentoring scheme to help students grow in confidence and skills.  The College used to link with Education Business Partnerships, which offer mentoring projects for adults.  The challenge with mentoring is that you need to dedicate time to it, but the Government is only interested in progress which can be measured in figures.  When I was a Governor of a school I was involved in exclusions panels, and from that I could see patterns of what goes wrong in students’ school careers.  Schools need help to address these issues.  Colleges are geared to keeping young people on their books so they maintain the funding for those young people, but they are limited in the resources that they can give to addressing issues like pastoral care.

Does the behaviour of disaffected young people in a group adversely affect the education of others?

I don’t agree with people who say that disaffected students should be removed from the ‘normal’ class, unless their behaviour is very threatening.  It is important to look at other ways of dealing with them, and build a system which will include them, as withdrawal is not a solution.  They have already been rejected in other areas of their life, perhaps by their family or step family, and we need to find a way to make them feel part of society. Perhaps people from local companies could be asked to volunteer their time or sponsor an initiative to address these student’s issues, or perhaps older or university students could act as mentors, particularly if they had similar issues and successfully overcame them.

Maybe Challenger or Skills Force would work with this sort of project?

Extra teaching support for needy children would take massive resources.  Teachers might well be sympathetic to a student’s problems, but the limited resources they have means that, ultimately, a student must conform or be removed from the class.

I think you’d need to distinguish between urgent situations – eg threatening someone with a knife, in which a student must be removed from others immediately, without discussion - and other levels of disruption, which require different treatment.  There is no structured approach which sets out how to deal with different types and degrees of behaviour, so such a structure would be needed.

People refer to pastoral care in a school, but all teachers show care for their students.  There are ways of building up a student’s confidence and self-respect.  If you praise some small aspect of a young person’s appearance or conduct, they will soon start to take pride in that aspect and make an effort to develop it.

Mentoring seems a good option where there is no other source of support, and we should look at how it could be achieved.  I mentor young people in my area and I can see the difference it makes, so I know that it’s a valuable tool, but how is it viewed by teachers and other professionals?

Mentoring used to be done more, and I was directly involved in it, but many schools gave it up as it took up too much time.  Schools let go of mentoring schemes when their links with the Education Business Partnerships ended.  There was a scheme in which very well-trained educationalists went into schools to mentor students.  These mentors had networks and meetings at which best practice was discussed and shared. There was also a mentoring scheme which involved volunteers from outside the education field. This had the advantage of allowing young people to let off steam about school life and teachers to someone independent.  Schools and students both need this sort of support.

Can you tell us a bit about the ‘Inspiring Communities’ initiative?

This project exits in six areas of the UK, including Folkestone. It involves a group of students and their parents, who need to be carefully chosen.  I designed four projects which could be taken on by families who were struggling with long-term health issues or unemployment, and I worked with the group over a year.  The students involved were the very needy, who had no role model of a successful adult who had achieved in higher education.  I can give you some examples of successes:-

• One young man who was very withdrawn and had been bullied joined the project for a year.  He went to London to a skills event for Higher and Further Education, and to Brussels for a few weeks to work with the European Community.  I had helped him learn some French before he went there.  He had a really good outcome from the project.
• A mother with low confidence and self-esteem surprised me by going off to explore Brussels on her own, following a map, and she gained a massive confidence boost as result.

Long term effects are still going on, like the projects which introduced young people and parents to the benefits of cooking together. Three of the parents are now pursuing GCSE courses. These projects did not take much funding, but I found a small amount of money for the initial set-up.  From that point, much of the progress was the result of the participants’ enthusiasm to carry it forward.

Many agencies work with vulnerable families, but these agencies are not linked up. Such links do not necessarily need financial support; the passion and drive of those involved are more important drivers. We need to support the parents to support the students.  It is not their fault they are ill or unemployed.  They are very caring parents, but the system and their health problems are stacked against them and they lose confidence.

The ‘softer’ aspect of education - the socio-economic setting - is important.  We could say that all young people should be offered mentoring to fill in any gaps that are left by other forms of training.

Some schools deal very well with students’ disruptive behaviour.  We should ask if any research has been done into how these schools handle it – ie what methods they use – and what makes a difference, either positive or negative?  Many students go through a bad phase and will come out of it eventually, but it has to be managed properly when it is happening.

What is very important is the curriculum.  Learning needs to be re-designed to lead a student realistically to their future working life, and should not be aimed at university as those who do not attend university can be seen to have fallen short.  I think the challenges of young people setting out into the world of work and training should be sorted out first, then from there you would work back to set up a school curriculum which supports this.

Yes, this Committee is about looking at the route, and vocational rather than academic training.  Do you use KentChoices4U?

No.

It would be very helpful to have your views on it.  Would you take a look at it and contact us with your opinion, please?

How does what you do relate to what academies have to do to attract good students?

I am a Governor of the Marsh Academy, which is over-subscribed.  It has a very different culture now that Roger De Haanis a director and investor in it, and has changed a lot since it became an academy.  It was previously in special measures but is now outstanding.  The buildings are old and not well maintained. It has been turned round by a new Principal, who meets with parents regularly and works closely with them.  Now it competes with the grammar school for good students.

It attracted an innovative Chinese maths teacher who used to work in local industry.  He approaches maths teaching by highlighting the practical applications of maths.  He also runs a weekend Badminton club at the Academy, and some students have joined who have never willingly taken part in PE before. The Badminton club starts at 8 am every Saturday and Sunday, and has 45 students. Some students who would not have stayed in school previously now do so as they would not be allowed to take part in the Badminton club if they skip other classes.  This man has had a ‘Teacher of the Year’ nomination as his inspiring approach has made such a big difference to the attitude of so many students.  It goes to show that smart new buildings aren’t everything when it comes to running a good school! 

I know other places that have very tatty buildings but are excellent schools and many times over-subscribed. 

Inspiring and dedicated personalities are important too.  One thing that Roger De Haan has brought to the Academy is that he views students as clients, to whom you must deliver a good service which meets their needs.  Head Teachers need to be very involved with students on a daily basis, as that personal contact and interest are important.

The Government’s response to the Wolf report refers to the need to raise the attainment of low-performing pupils.  Local authorities have to look at best practice across their schools and local academies to assess how this could be addressed, and report back to Government in December 2011.

I think we need to work better with industry, and I do a lot of work with local companies.  One project involves local companies seeking some artwork for their premises – something relevant to the company – and local students produce some artwork for them.  Students have to demonstrate initiative in producing and pitching their art project to the company.  This interaction helps the students’ understanding of local industry, and makes industry something less distant and more relevant.  Previously, students might see a large company such as Pfizer as being purely about science, and hence discount them as an employer if they are not interested in science, but such a company also employs people to manage administration, staff catering, site maintenance, etc, so could offer employment which is not related to science.  There are many very successful local companies (eg Unilever) in the UK who offer mentoring very successfully to local Primary and Secondary schools. 

Some young people still go to Secondary school not being able to read or write.  How can we live with this? They are bound to become the unemployed of the future.

Schools are responsible for young people’s education but not for their employability, and they need a way to measure a student’s employability.

It will be very hard to embed this.  I think it is essential that teachers have a taste of industry and do not just open a textbook.  Traditional teaching methods are inflexible.

What recommendation would you like the Select Committee to make to address the issues you have told us about?  Select Committee recommendations have the power to bring about change.

There is a need for much time and energy to be spent on preparing young people for work.  It is not necessarily about large sums of money.  Many people are willing to give their time and skills to help young students. It needs more than just people in grey suits.

Many teachers are not exceptional but are very capable and able to lead young people.  The best teachers have some other life experience apart from teaching – like an industry mathematician who plays Badminton. The old saying that ‘it takes a village to educate a child’ is true.  How far would such a system need to be formalised? Finding good people to mentor and inspire young people seems to happen randomly or by chance, and arrangements seem to be ad hoc.

Mentoring would need to be formalised as you’d need to find and train the right people.  Mentoring cannot be undertaken by just anyone.  What I would like the Select Committee to recommend is a national mentoring scheme.  This would need to be organised by a body which is independent from schools, and would need also to have someone in the KCC to make links. 

If the mentoring system were formalised, would you risk losing the brilliant eccentrics?

Some people are natural mentors.  Some have had problems in their past and can see instinctively where a young person is coming from.

I think there should be an employability aspect as part of the context of a mentoring scheme, when this is implemented.

Yes, if something is not properly embedded in a scheme, it could miss being properly measured.

I am concerned about the financial imperatives of colleges, ie keeping students in seats so the college continues to receive funding for them.  We should re-visit the IAG on which students based their decision to choose a particular college or course. The aim would be to get them to stay in a course because they wanted to be there.

In Further Education, we do have some students who don’t want to be there, as they haven’t found the right college or the right course.  Maybe colleges should not be funded for the number of students in seats, as this pressures them into holding onto unsuitable or unhappy students.

The KCC can influence this.  I know from a Councillor colleague that his Rotarian group gives young people experience of interviews by conducting real life interviews with them.  They keep the tone friendly but even then some young people find it very frightening and do not handle it well.  I think it would be useful for students to have more of this sort of link, and I know the Rotarians would be willing to help.  We could identify a project and seek groups which would be interested in delivering it in their area.

If such a scheme were to include local businesses, it would have to be right for the school and the business.  Needs should be identified first, and then a suitable scheme built up to meet them. 

I have a passion for this subject, and am open to any ideas which will help address young people’s needs. I am happy to answer any further questions that the Committee might want to send me.

There is a thought I will leave with you – to fail at something is not necessarily bad thing, as failure is part of success.