Agenda item

The Chair welcomed the guest to the committee and a short introduction was given by Members.

 

Q – Please introduce yourself and odder and outline of the roles and responsibilities that your post involves?

 

Simon O’Keefe stated that he was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of The Stour Academy Trust and explained that his primary role involved setting the strategy and vision for the Trust, building the culture across the entirety of the Trust, team building and capital allocation. 

 

Q - What is The Stour Academy Trust and what are its values?

 

In 2009, following his recognised achievement, the Local Authority sought help for Sturry C.E Primary School (now the primary sponsor of the Trust) and in 2010, it started its journey of federation with Hersden Village Primary School.  This was primarily the start of working in strategic collaboration,  providing school to school support rather than working with schools on a stand-alone basis. Within two days of the federation the school was placed into special measures, however within 9 months of rapid improvement, Ofsted had graded the school as “Good.” However, Michael Gove, The Secretary for Education at that time, identified the bottom 200 worst performing schools in the county, declaring they needed to be sponsored by an academy.  Given Hersden Primary’s historical data it was included in this bottom 200 and hence the establishment of The Stour Academy Trust.

 

The Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) was approached by the Local Authority (LA), Department for Education (DfE) and the Regional schools commissioners (RSCs), asking that it support the failing schools and seek solutions to improve and maintain a level of success.

 

The Stour Academy Trust worked within a strong collaborative model of school to school support (S2S), there is no stand-alone school. Simon O’Keefe noted that with the models cohesive approach, it was always seeking the very best practice and once identified, this practice was then deployed and adopted throughout other schools.

 

In regard to the values, The Stour Academy Trust had placed the needs of the children at the heart of its decision making and placed a heavy emphasis on the well-being and education of children above all else. Simon O’Keefe went on to elaborate further on the importance of a child’s well-being and said that if a child was not ready to learn, there would be no success to measure. Prior to its new status, Sturry C.E Primary School was primarily led by the needs of the adults rather than those of the children, however due to the improvements made, the schools went on to adopt a pro-active ‘can-do’ attitude and removed the barriers to learning.

 

Q – What other schools are in the Trust?

 

Simon O’Keefe said that there were currently seven schools in the Trust and another opening in September. The Stour Academy Trust was attempting to collaborate however due to the scale of this, it was not possible to manage. Therefore, the schools were grouped into 4 geographical hubs, these areas would include Canterbury, Swale and Ashford.  Within Swale the hub consisted of Thistle Hill Academy, Richmond Academy, Lansdowne Primary School; this hub had capacity for a further school however there was no intention to move forward with the plan at the present time. Within Canterbury the hub consisted of Sturry C.E. Primary School, Hersden Village Primary School and Adisham C.E. Primary School, again having achieved outstanding reports from Ofsted The Stour Academy Trust gained the capacity to support other schools within that area. Within Ashford, the hub consisted of Finberry Primary School and Chilmington Green Primary School that opens in September, the plan in place allowed for four primary schools to eventually consist within the Ashford hub.

 

The collaborative model of the Trust had allowed a mix of schools to be brought together, blending those in more challenging circumstances and environments to work alongside those who were in less challenging situations. Once the Trust had reached its strategy for growth, it had no plans to expand outside of the region.

 

Q – Are all of the schools in deprived areas?

 

Lansdowne Primary School consists of 37% of children in receipt of Pupil Premium funding, similar to Richmond Academy. Hersden Village Primary School, within the Canterbury hub, also has a high percentage of pupils in receipt of this funding.

 

Q - Please provide an overview of Pupil Premium allocation in your schools. Is there a clear rationale for how Pupil Premium funding should be spent, and is this communicated to all stakeholders?

 

Simon O’Keefe advised members that there was no quick fix, what the Trust focused on was investing  its Pupil Premium into staff training and development to ensure it created a strong network of specialists to support pupils.

 

A Senior Social Worker was recently appointed to the Trust in 2016 and has proved to be a significantly beneficial investment. With well-being at the forefront of the Trust’s values, all academies follow an established nurturing ethos supported by trained staff that help to identify and support pupils with any emotional, social or behavioural needs.  By having a high quality of teaching that was focused on early year education, this was where improvement started to be made.

 

It was stated that not every child on Pupil Premium was failing; many children do achieve and have a good support network at home. However, when a child is not making progress, specialist staff around the child step in to ensure each child receives specialist support bespoke to them. It is essential that both the parent and child are involved in those conversations, so the correct system of support can be developed. There was no “one size fits all” approach as different children had different types of disadvantages and must be supported on an individual basis.

 

Other issues such as when a child enters into early education on free school meals, did not mean that the child is labelled as low ability, they just had low experiences and have not received the same opportunities. These children are not put onto the Specialist Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) register until much later in their education. The essential aim was to immerse them within their early years into a language rich environment as reading is key to that child’s education.

 

 

Q – Please discuss the findings of the recent Ofsted report “Unknown Children Destined for Disadvantaged” (2016). In your view, to what extent is the Early Years Pupil Premium effective in promoting the academic achievements of vulnerable younger children?

 

Simon O’Keefe noted that he fully agreed with placing the focus on Early Years. Quite often, the pre-schools that tended to be in a disadvantaged area were often struggling to raise standards because it was difficult to recruit staff to those areas. Furthermore, when the pre-schools recruited within those areas, it recruited for the local community that may have had limited availability of staff with the necessary skills in the first place. However by finding and creating those specialist support roles within schools, the staff could engage with families and pupils from a very early stage. Taking Hersden Childrens Centre as a prime example of this it relied on people coming into the centre rather than going out to engage with families. The Trust used its Pupil Premium to ensure it had a number of trained staff within its hubs that can be deployed effectively. With stand-alone schools it would be a struggle to find that same level of specialist resources and a high level of dependency would be placed upon the teacher to carry out multiple functions. The advantage of the Trust was having the money there to use strategically to ensure specialist staff were working as a team to support families.

 

The Pupil Premium allocation to the Trust is £732,200 and this was to be used as affectively as possible. Standalone schools could not provide the same level of support compared to those within the Trust. For example, Simon O’Keefe stated that he had a number of Lead Practitioners who were not allocated to a specific class at his disposal that he could deploy to areas of greatest need.

 

Q – It is a great advantage wherever you can share resources. What more can KCC do to ensure that we improve the attainment gap?

 

The Trust has moved towards putting more resources into Early Years and creating those specialist roles. There was a danger that when schools were faced with financial problems, the use of Pupil Premium could be used to prop up other areas. Certain strategies actually seek to further disadvantage Pupil Premium pupils, for example, the use of additional Teaching Assistants (TAs) in place of quality first teaching.

 

    “The Pupil Premium grant is used effectively to provide strong, additional provision for disadvantaged children. These pupils’ progress is tracked very carefully, and exceptional tailored support if provided when needed. Leader’s actions are firmly focused on ensuring that this group of pupils attendance continues to improve, and that they are empowered to achieve highly.” (Ofsted Report, Lansdowne 2017)

 

It was duly noted that public services were stretched financially and therefore it was essential that best practice was identified and shared with other schools. One matter that was not mentioned within this report is recruitment and retention and if the Trust could not motivate its staff to do the work then it was a pointless exercise. It was recognised that socially deprived schools were the hardest to recruit to and with a shortage of teachers, trying to close that gap between the disadvantaged was becoming increasingly more difficult as it meant pushing the government harder.

Due to on-going growth of pupils and the continued demand for quality teaching, the decision was made to move to a Trust contract whereby teachers were employed by the Trust rather than the school itself. Such a contract meant that when a school within the Trust required additional support, teachers were given the opportunity to move with the incentive of developing their own professional development and furthering their career. Simon O’Keefe stated that this allowed him to move qualified teachers to where they are needed most; this was particularly beneficial for mid-year vacancies such as maternity cover or long-term sickness.

 

 

Q – The solution would be to pay them more?

 

Supply agencies were going into Universities and guaranteeing students work however with the current climate; students had the option to be more selective.

 

Simon O’Keefe stated that the Trust offered staff a golden hello of £1,000 in a lump sum and a good work life balance package, giving staff an additional annual leave day after two years of continuous service. What did make a real difference was the culture invested within schools, if the Trust offered high quality training and career opportunities, they stayed.

 

Q – In terms of Pupil Premium, what does this mean? If parents are not naturally engaged and this is crucial, what do you do to engage with them specifically, and in particular, what do you do to engage with them regarding attendance? Can you use Pupil Premium to address this?

 

Engaging with parents meant knocking on doors, going to physically see them at their home however staff would not be expected to attend the home alone, this was where working as a team gave staff the confidence to engage with families collaboratively and build that relationship. There were some parents that struggled to drop their children off at multiple schools, if this was the case and impacted on a child’s attendance, the school could use its Pupil Premium to pay for that child to travel to school.

 

It was vital that enrichment happened within the school day and not as an add-on. By making them attend additional clubs not within the school curriculum, the child was missing out on that love of learning. Schools needed to move away from judging the success of a child by figures and judging them from what they were learning and engaging with in their lessons.

 

The Trust approach now meant that there was a set of highly skilled professionals within schools that could talk to parents and work on breaking down those barriers.

 

 

Q – In regard to recruitment issues and the Agency Recruitment Companies trumping you, is this a burden on you? There is the potential to recruit highly skilled staff however if University students are being put into Agency work they are losing that potential skill base?

 

The Stour Academy Trust was due to run its own fair this year before the Agency companies went into the Universities. The Stour Academy Trust partnered with one small supplier agency which means that the agency will give The Stour Academy Trust a good supply of teachers as and when they are needed and due to the agency being used exclusively by The Stour Academy Trust, it means that they will not be charged excessive amounts. Simon O’Keefe ensures staff are retained through career and work/life packages however the remaining issue is that, if Simon takes a teacher, what happens to the school down the road who are still unable to recruit?

 

Q – In regard to maintaining the balance between focusing on bespoke work for the child and a whole class approach, should we be making it more of an obligation/ target for the schools to ring fence the money that don’t do it at the moment? Should we be saying that this should be the approach for all schools?

 

Simon O’Keefe stated that there needed to be a more robust system in place as there was a danger of budgets being squeezed, thereby causing Pupil Premium money to be used for other purposes. For instance, if the decision was made that a teacher is required instead of specialist staff, a school may have been inclined to use the money in a different approach.

 

Each school needed a strategic overview. There must be robustness in the system to identify strategies being used by schools and if they are used to have the impact they are supposed to. Pupil Premium money needed to be monitored and given to a group of schools that shared their resource ensuring it had a range of professions embedded within the schools to identify the need for those bespoke pupils.

 

Q – Is there conflict on how much you should be focusing on staff whether it be specialist staff or staff development and how much should be used for providing the extra expenses i.e. trips/ ICT etc.?

 

Simon O’Keefe acknowledged that in an ideal situation everyone, for example, would like to have a laptop however, unless the school can provide the quality teaching needed to say how this resource would effectively be used, it would be of no value at all. Therefore, as stated previously, a majority of the funding needed to go into developing staff and training specialist staff as it is the quality of these that support the Trust in making a difference.

 

For example, Thistle Hill Academy had 2 large rooms given over to specialist unit (behavioural and emotional) for a total for 14 children and was successful in integrating these children back into classrooms. However, these rooms could have been used to educate 60 Early Years children, so this resource would have had a greater impact being used as a provision for Early Years children, thus possibly eliminating the need for a behavioural/emotional unit for some of these children in later years as it would have been tackled at a very early.

 

 

Q – Sutton Trust spears to suggest that the investment of Pupil Premium money in high cost staff is not as productive as other low cost interventions. The Education Representative supported this toolkit. He said that if he were a teacher now with disadvantaged children and looking for a good quality off-the-shelf teacher programme for disadvantaged children, he would struggle to find it. Do you agree?

 

Simon O’Keefe stated that it was not necessary to have a teaching programme. Children need to be engaged with learning and the way to do this is to engage with the child by focusing on their interests. Children are not robots and schemes are not something that the Trust is in favour of. Children learn from good quality teaching and it is essential that those provisions are put into Early Years.

 

 

Q – Have you found a way of addressing parents who have a lack of communication skills?

 

A parent’s aggression is not aimed at the staff, it is usually aimed at the organisation. Staff need to have the essential training to break down those communication barriers. 

 

For example, in regards to Sutton Trust, if the Pupil Premium is being invested into specialist staff within a stand-alone school. There is a disproportionate amount of money going into one group of staff rather than a range of specialisms across a number of areas.

 

Q – Can you clarify what interventions are used?

 

·         Children arrive with low experiences not low ability

·         No child is put onto the SEND register in Early Years

·         Speech Link quick assessment, there is strong focus on language rich environment and language rich curriculum

·         Improved quality of teaching

·         Team approach, working with families as soon as possible, the younger the better

·         More nurseries attached to schools with professional teachers

·         Nurture teams

·         Long term strategic views, not short term fixes

·         Curriculum that engages and creates learners, not necessarily creating children that can pass a test

·         Action research 2 year training programme

·         Free school meals do not necessarily mean disadvantage – the child’s needs may be being met

 

 

Schools are generally quite good at addressing children’s learning needs but not great at addressing behavioural and social needs, there needs to be greater focus on this.

 

If the child’s behaviour has not improved there needs to be a different approach adopted. Do not continue to do something if it isn’t having an effect and use the Pupil Premium in a different way to achieve better outcomes.

 

David Carter produced The 4 stages of School Improvement; stabilising, repair, improve and maintain.