Agenda item

Matt Dunkley (Corporate Director, Children, Young People and Education) was in attendance.

The Chair welcomed the guests to the Committee and a short introduction was given by Members.

Q – Please introduce yourself and provide an overview of the roles and responsibilities that your post involves.

Matt Dunkley had been the Corporate Director for Children, Young People and Education at Kent County Council since November 2017. Prior to that, he had a 34-year career in services for children – including 8 years as Director of Children’s Services for East Sussex County Council and, more recently, 9 months as DCS turning around Children’s Services in Norfolk County Council. Matt Studied and worked in the USA. He also worked for 4 years for the State Government of Victoria, Australia. Matt was President of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) in 2011-12, and was made a CBE for services to Children and Families in 2014.

Q – Please discuss the refreshed Kent’s Strategy for Vulnerable Learners.

Matt said that the Children, Young People and Education Cabinet Committee were considering the Kent Strategy for Vulnerable Learners in March 2018. The Committee were looking at whether Kent needed to re-calibrate priorities and highlight ways in which best practice could be measured. He said it was important to develop greater depth to the service offer and approach to identify groups who were very vulnerable. He said that Children’s Services were currently looking at what more could be done to tailor the approach to vulnerable groups to ensure that a difference was made. He said that there were six overall priorities, this was the answer to what works:

1.    Aspirational Cultures: The relentless ambition to succeed – Matt said that schools needed to develop several bespoke measures tailored to each school’s circumstance.

2.    Individual Learning Pathways and Support – Matt said to ensure that all learners succeed, learning programmes and activities needed to be personalised and supported by an individualised approach to addressing barriers to learning and emotional support.

3.    Parental Engagement and Involvement – Through working with families, parents, carers and wider families, they would be involved in decision making and will be encouraged to actively be involved in children, young people and education.

4.    Leadership, Teaching and Learning – Matt said it was important for schools to set high aspirations, devolve responsibility for raising achievement to all staff, and ensure that quality teaching was seen as a priority and teachers see every learner as an individual. It would important for schools to close achievement gaps and build upon high quality teaching for all learners.

5.    Promoting Collaborations –Matt said that it was important to develop more effective district collaborations, optimise the use of experiences and resources between schools and KCC services and therefore narrow achievement gaps for vulnerable learners.

6.    Evidence based use of resources – Matt said that the tools and resources that had been developed would be used to monitor pupil progress more comprehensively and monitor the progress of specific strategies, so that schools respond quickly if the strategies for supporting vulnerable groups were not having sufficient impact. He said that the challenge was to push to schools and providers to make sure they are taking an evidence-based approach to get the outcomes desired.

Matt said that the six overall priorities were put in place with an aim to close gaps. He said that although the standards within Children’s Services had improved significantly, not all groups were improving at the same pace, these groups were being closely monitored and supported. He said that development of Early Years Pupil Premium was key. It was important to ensure that learning gaps were closed from a young age as the younger a child is when they receive interventions the bigger impact you have.

In response to a question regarding school attendance, Matt said that attending school every day was very important and would affect the outcome of learning if a child was regularly absent. He said that the key aspect to ensuring high levels of attendance was a combination of working with the child to ensure they were offered an exciting, invigorating curriculum, and to work with the family to make sure they were doing all that they could to support their children’s attendance at school. He said that at a county level, it was important to work to create the conditions in which children will want to learn and engage in learning. He said that in circumstances of persistent absence, schools would reach out to pupil’s homes to ensure that families were supported if they were experiencing troubles. KCC offers support to schools during this time, and Matt said that this support was very important and crucial. He said that Kent needed to make sure that they were doing all that they could as a county to ensure that schools were supported in making sure that parents were getting their children to school.

In response to a question regarding school visits from KCC support services, Matt said that pilots had been put in place to allow Early Help and Social Care teams to work with particular schools to support them with specific issues and spend time with them to work on transition issues. He said that he had hoped to share more information this year with regards to the new pilots.

In response to a question relating to the allocation of Pupil Premium, Matt felt that Free School Meals (FSM) was a reasonable proxy indicator but was obviously reliant on parents claiming eligibility for the schools to receive the additional funding. Many of the schools were confident that they had strategies in place to liaise with parents to make sure that they were claiming all benefits that they were entitled to. Schools were explaining to parents that it would benefit the school as well as the child if they could show their eligibility for FSM, even if their child did not eat the free meal provided. He said that there was a major issue with using attainment as an indicator. So, for example you could have pupils with low prior attainment attract Pupil Premium funding. However, Matt said that rewarding schools financially based on attainment could introduce perverse incentives.

Q – Have you picked up any new ways of working/experiences from working in other districts/councils?

Matt said that when working in Victoria, Australia, the State Government introduced a lump sum in their school funding formula which was associated with progress, so at the start of each key stage, students who had made poor progress would continue to receive the lump sum when they started secondary school due to there being a larger gap to close. He said that the strategy was in its’ early stages and that it might be worth considering for Kent but would have to be on progress not attainment. He said he was keen to learn more about the way in which Kent approached closing the attainment gap. He said it sometimes proved challenging to manage tension between bespoke and personalised strategies but also promoting teaching and learning strategies, it can be a very difficult approach for schools. He said that schools had to have a detailed comprehensive teaching and learning strategy that was provided across the school, which judged levels of success with the most vulnerable students. He said that at the same time, it was important to acknowledge that not all children were the same, it needed to be personalised for each child.

In response to a question relating to progress measures in Victoria, Australia, Matt said two years ago it was decided that the extra money going into the formula would be used to support deprived and vulnerable students. A small amount of money was invested into measuring prior attainment around the early childhood assessment for primary school children, and for secondary schools, the child had an assessment based on the progress that they had made through primary school. If the pupil failed to make expected progress, the child would be given a small lump sum for the next few years throughout secondary school.

Q – If Pupil Premium was used and a progress measure was considered, would the Pupil Premium money be ring-fenced to each child?

Matt said that legally that would not be something that Kent would be able to decide, that was for central government. He said that a national case could be made where the Pupil Premium funding in the National Funding Formula was supplemented to reduce some of the funding that was purely for deprivation and then have a portion of funding that was linked to progress. He said that he did not favour ring-fencing money to individual pupils. He said that schools should be able to allocate funding as they see fit, whilst taking into account the Pupil Premium funding.

Q – How can Kent County Council support children with challenging behaviours and their families with regards to school attendance and their behaviour in school?

Matt said it was important for children to feel safe, healthy and happy in school to allow them to be ready for learning each day. He said that the new Directorate is focused on eliminating the ‘one size fits all’ approach and making sure that all children in Kent had a good childhood. He said that the tools should be available to teachers and practitioners and handled in a way in which they see fit, this was why Pupil Premium funding needed to be seen as a whole, not tagged to individual children. By taking an integrated approach to supporting vulnerable children and families, the new Directorate is aiming to narrow the gap in outcomes for disadvantaged children.

Q - What more can KCC do, if anything, to improve the effectiveness of the Pupil Premium in raising the educational attainment of vulnerable pupils and in narrowing the attainment gap?

Matt said that Kent had developed toolkits for schools and were providing schools with best practice through the KELSI website, but this needed additional promotion. He said it would be interesting to see whether the creation of the Education Services Company would give Kent more flexibility on how schools were supported. He said that in Kent there was a challenge for providing school places, a higher proportion of vulnerable learners were in a school that is not rated Good or Outstanding, it was important to ensure that all schools were supported to address this issue. He said that there was much more work to be done with regards to High Needs Funding and Special Educational Needs provision. There were issues relating to secondary learning and emotional resilience, successful schools often worked around resilience. Kent were looking at the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and health offer which would ensure that Kent were travelling towards a more school based and community based model. He said that Kent needed to ensure a whole package was being provided to young people who experienced multiple disadvantages, for example young people who have housing difficulties, severe learning difficulties, carer responsibilities etc.

In response to a question regarding learner’s engagement, Matt said there were many interesting models used by schools about how inclusive teaching involves effective, straight forward methods. This meant that students could receive more ‘real time’ feedback on their learning and progress. They were able to use online testing modules to allow them to assess their own progress and to understand the steps that needed to be taken to allow them to progress further.

In response to a question regarding different marking strategies for teachers and attainment, Matt said that it was important that support was provided, and that targets were set for individual students, he said that there was nothing more corrosive than lower expectations. He said that engagement of parents in secondary schools was more challenging and that some schools did not know when to engage parents, although this was not an excuse for lack of communication. He said that not all parents were willing or able to engage with schools, therefore some children needed time to complete homework in school hours due to family troubles, parenting issues etc. He said that all schools teach their students and engage with parents in a different way. There were processes and procedures in place to provide support for teachers to ensure that children were not educationally disadvantaged.

In response to a comment, Matt said that Pupil Premium children were generally doing very well in primary school, but their levels of progress generally drop in secondary school.  The directorate needs to look at what it is about the transition from primary to secondary school that affects vulnerable learners and creates difficulty for them and what we can do to better support that transition.