Improving education on the Isle of Wight

Improving education on the Isle of Wight Statement from the Director of Children’s Services for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight October 2013 www.han...
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Improving education on the Isle of Wight

Statement from the Director of Children’s Services for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight October 2013

www.hants.gov.uk

This document was the subject of consultation with the Island’s education system in the spring term of 2014. No written responses were made so this is the original version. The Plan is being implemented and improvements are being made but we are publishing this version online to record the starting point of that improvement. Periodic reports summarising progress will appear in due course.

John Clarke Deputy Director of Children’s Services (Education & Inclusion) June 2014

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Improving education on the Isle of Wight Statement from the Director of Children’s Services for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight October 2013

Contents

Background and introduction

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The current situation (as at September 2013)

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The underlying explanations for current performance

5

School improvement strategy - overview

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School improvement strategy – individual institutions within the maintained sector

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School improvement strategy – inadequate schools becoming sponsored academies

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School improvement strategy – professional development

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School improvement strategy – governance

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School improvement strategy – attendance

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Post 16 Provision

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Creating the space for rapid improvement

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Wider partnerships and school improvement

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Conclusion

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Appendix 1: Ofsted letter following its inspection of the Local Authority’s arrangements for school improvement Appendix 2: Detailed action plan to address issues identified by Ofsted in its inspection of the arrangements for school improvement Appendix 3: Action plan to address improvements in outcomes in the early years

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Appendix 4a: Hampshire Teaching and Leadership College – Offer for schools subscribing to the Isle of Wight schools learning and development package Appendix 4b: Hampshire Teaching and Leadership College – Subscription offer to the Isle of Wight Council Appendix 5: Supporting school improvement: Improving Governance.

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Background and introduction

1.1

Ofsted inspected the Isle of Wight’s arrangements for safeguarding towards the end of 2012. They were judged to be inadequate. Further inspections by Ofsted and analysis by the Department for Education (DfE) revealed that the school system on the island was significantly underperforming. GCSE results in 2012 were in the region of fifteen percentage points below the national average; Key Stage 2 results were poor and children failed to make adequate progress through that key stage. Exclusions from school in the secondary sector were high and school attendance in that sector by far the worst in the country. The most recent figures from Ofsted, as of June 2013, show that the island has half the proportion of outstanding schools as in England as a whole and five times the proportion of schools that are inadequate.

1.2

It was against this background that the DfE issued a direction to the Isle of Wight Council to enter into a strategic partnership with Hampshire County Council so that the latter’s Children’s Services department could take over the running of the services that, statutorily, are the responsibility of the Director of Children’s Services under the 2004 Act – children’s social care and education.

1.3

That direction included a request for a statement setting out the Director of Children’s Services’ view of the current state of the island’s maintained schools and the strategies that will be employed to improve them and the work being done to support schools that need to become sponsored academies. This is that statement, but it also sets out how the many deficiencies identified in July by Ofsted through its inspection of the Isle of Wight Council’s school improvement service will be addressed and that service improved. The letter following that inspection appears at Appendix 1 and the detailed action that will be taken appear at Appendix 2.

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The current situation (as at September 2013)

2.1

Outcomes at the end of early years are below national averages and the performance of more vulnerable children is poor. However, Ofsted inspections of early years’ settings are generally more positive.

2.2

Key Stage 2 results in reading, writing and mathematics, taken together, remained at 71% in 2013 – among the poorer performing authorities but some way from being the worst.

2.3

The progress made by children during the four years from the end of Key Stage 1 until the end of Key Stage 2 is still likely to appear to be poor in 2013. This is widely attributed – and probably correctly – to an historical inflation of Key Stage 1 scores on the island and this makes it difficult to secure good progress through Key Stage 2

2.4

Currently, there are four primary schools that are judged to be inadequate and there may be more to come. Ofsted gave the island’s 4

system some time to adjust to the new primary/secondary organisation that replaced the previous middle school system and some primary schools have not been inspected in their new form. 2.5

Discussions with the DfE have been initiated for all four of the inadequate primary schools around sponsored academy status.

2.6

Some improvement in headline GCSE results has been seen in all but one of the secondary schools in 2013 (although results are not yet validated). No secondary school is below the government’s ‘floor standards’ of 40% 5 A*-C GCSEs including English and mathematics. However, the results for the island’s 16 year olds are still likely to be in the region of 10 percentage points below the national average for 2013. Exclusions remain high in the island’s secondary schools and attendance poor. There was some reduction in the number of young people who were persistently absent in 2012-13 but the percentage absence overall was almost as weak as last year when it was by far the worst in the country.

2.7

All six secondary schools have now been inspected. Three of them are in special measures, one has serious weaknesses, one requires improvement and one is good. Only an estimated 11% of the island’s secondary aged children currently attend a good school. Generally, however, monitoring visits by Ofsted are testament to an improving picture in most of the schools.

2.8

Two of the six secondary schools are sponsored academies and new arrangements involving an executive headteacher over both schools have been put in place by the sponsoring trust. Three are in the process of negotiation to become sponsored academies and the Local Authority is involved in those discussions.

2.9

In summary, despite some improvement in 2013, the quality of the island’s schools taken together lags a long way behind the standard achieved in most of the rest of the country. A major and concerted effort is needed to bring educational outcomes to, and beyond, the national average.

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The underlying explanations for current performance

3.1

The partnership between the Isle of Wight Council and Hampshire County Council began on 1 July 2013 although some preliminary work took place before then. There have been extensive discussions with elected members, existing Local Authority staff, headteachers both in their schools and at three island-wide conferences, chairs of governors, teacher unions and several conversations with Ofsted and the DfE. All of these and the letter to the island’s council following Ofsted’s inspection of its school improvement service have informed this analysis of why things are as they are. There are some clear hypotheses that will become more nuanced as more work is done.

3.2

There is no one event, policy, person or action that has led to the current situation. It has come about through a combination of 5

separate but often inter-related factors, some in the recent past and some that are part of history, culture and geography. 3.3

There is a view on the island that many of the current ills can be attributed to the relatively recent re-organisation of the school system. Middle schools were removed and replaced with a 4-11, 11-18 system. The reorganisation was not well done. There were several administrative failings in relation to the new arrangements and the professional development for staff, including headteachers, being asked to work with unfamiliar year groups was not forthcoming. A large number of surplus places remained within the system creating inefficiency in the use of the resources. The work of schools was disrupted, particularly in the year 2011-2012, and this is, to a degree, represented in the GCSE results of 2012. The improvement in 2013, then, takes GCSE performance close to where it had been in 2011, not to heights that have never been achieved before.

3.4

The way in which the school system was reorganised inflicted temporary damage on outcomes for children and young people but this is not the only, or most serious, factor that has produced the current situation. The Local Authority made other mistakes that were far more damaging in their potential consequences. Simply, it failed in a number of statutory duties vis a vis schools. It had insufficient regard for the responsibilities set out in the 2006 Education Act and the statutory guidance on the role of the Lead Member for Children’s Services and the Director of Children’s Services of 2005 and 2009. It also missed the reiteration of those duties by Sir Michael Wilshaw in his speech to the North of England Conference in 2012.

3.5

The Authority took neither rapid nor decisive action in relation to poorly performing schools. In fact, its use of data and information was so poor that it had no accurate sense of which schools were performing poorly, or well, and in what ways. It failed to develop robust school improvement strategies, leaving itself, and others, without direction and leaving schools broadly to their own devices. This lack of focus for the work of the whole system allowed those without authority to fill the space, putting forward solutions and schemes that frequently lacked coherence and aimed at different goals. Rather than seeking to lead schools forward towards educational excellence on behalf of the island’s community the Authority used schools’ growing self management, indeed autonomy, as a chance to cut them adrift. It reduced its capacity to such an extent that it was no longer possible to offer leadership, challenge, support and intervention where that was necessary and although the few staff left worked very hard to fill the void, there is little evidence of concerted action by the Authority, across the island, to tackle problems common to a number of schools, little evidence of the kind of school to school collaboration that leads to higher standards and scant evidence that the Authority involved the school community often enough in the decisions it took. Neither headteachers nor governors were properly supported. In short, many of the island’s schools felt

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abandoned. Some primary headteachers, in particular, were deflected from their work in overseeing teaching and learning because they had to spend their time procuring support services, only tangentially related to their core purpose, with little guidance from the Authority. 3.6

It would be wrong to assume that these recent events taken together explain all the ills that afflict the island’s school system. There are more deep-seated reasons around culture, beliefs, expectations and insularity that are at play. The system has been heavily selfreferential with insufficient regard paid to what happens across the country or in the areas of statistical neighbours. It has seemed enough for a school to consider itself the best in its area and scant attention has been given to the fact that across the country the school might well be closer to the bottom than the top.

3.7

There are major issues around aspirations and expectations. Although there have been some suggestions that the island’s children and young people have low aspirations a recent Children’s Society survey has shown that this not the case. It is those of many of the adults that are too low. There is insufficient press for achievement and visits to all the maintained schools by school improvement professionals since September 2013 reveal that some of them simply believe themselves to be better than they are. Benchmarks for what constitutes high quality have been inaccurately calibrated.

3.8

There are serious issues around school leadership and the quality of teaching - and there is clearly a relationship between the two. A relatively large number of Ofsted inspections report insufficient attention by leaders, and governors, to improving the quality of the classroom experience for children and even in the good schools there is too little outstanding teaching. The systems to support high levels of challenge and the quality of teaching are not in place in many schools. Performance management is weak; the tracking of children’s progress is, at best, at an early stage of development in many of the schools; approaches to evaluation are immature and there is little evidence of quality in school improvement planning.

3.9

The island’s teaching force is unusually static. Most teachers develop their careers within the same school or by moving to another on the island. Some move from the mainland to the island to work but this is relatively rare. Of the eight schools that appointed new headteachers to take up their posts in September 2013, only one was not from the island. This need not, of itself, present a problem. Good quality leaders and teachers can work on the island just as they can anywhere else. The problem is rather concerned with the professional development of headteachers, staff – and governors. This has not happened with sufficient regularity or quality and it has not been sufficiently sharp to impact positively on outcomes for children and young people.

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School improvement strategy – overview

4.1

The situation in most of the island’s schools requires urgent attention. It is not possible to approach improvement as though the island is in a steady – and acceptable – state that has occasional difficulties but is broadly effective. This is far from the case.

4.2

It needs an infusion of people to energise the system, articulate a statement of what constitutes quality, establish sharply focused improvement programmes in individual schools, institute and implement an island-wide professional development programme and make such engagements with partners and the wider island community that will service the interests of improving the outcomes for children and young people.

4.3

Key to improvement will be a growing belief on the island that the school system can be improved and that children and young people can do better. Hampshire Children’s Services can help that to happen but the real work and commitment will be needed from the people already there.

4.4

For that reason, this school improvement strategy should be seen as the first step, the first indication of what work is needed. Through the autumn of 2013 and the early part of 2014 it will be important to do further work, based on this plan, to produce the island community’s vision and strategy for education, bold statements and detailed actions for what the island will do for itself and its children. Schools will need to identify what their individual contributions will be towards improving the whole system, raising standards sufficiently and meeting the criteria that will constitute success.

4.5

Those criteria have been developed for a three-year period, for September 2016, though there are milestones along the way. They are based on the aspirations of elected members on behalf of the island community. Improved outcomes for children and young people always lag behind the process improvements so the bulk of the numerical improvement is envisaged for the second and third years and only modest changes to results in September 2014. The details are set out at the beginning of Appendix 2 but the headlines are below.

4.6

The percentage of children attaining a good level of development in the early years will be two points above the national average by September 2016.

4.7

Performance at the end of Key Stage 2 at level 4 for reading, writing and mathematics, taken together will be two percentage points above the national average by September 2016.

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4.8

Performance at the end of Key Stage 2 for level 5 for reading, writing and mathematics taken together will be 1 percentage point above the national average by September 2016.

4.9

Performance at the end of Key Stage 4, 5A*-C GCSE including English and maths, will be at the national average by September 2016.

4.10

The gap between days lost in absence on the island and nationally, and the incidence of persistent absence, will be halved by September 2015 and removed altogether by September 2016.

4.11

During the whole three-year period all schools judged to be inadequate will be out of that category within the national timescale, all Local Authority statements of action will be fit for purpose and all Ofsted monitoring visits to inadequate schools will report reasonable progress.

4.12

By September 2016 the proportion of island schools, including academies, judged good or outstanding will outstrip the national average by 2 percentage points.

4.13

All these success criteria represent a significant improvement on the current position but there is a huge willingness to work for better outcomes from the school system across the island. School leaders and chairs of governors are well aware of the issues. Few people were surprised by the letter that followed the inspection of the Council’s school improvement service – not staff in schools, the Council’s staff or the elected members – and all are now committed to taking the action that is needed. In particular, initial conversations with the headteacher community indicate a genuine willingness to bring about positive change and a desire to transform the quality of education being offered across the island. If this energy and goodwill can be harnessed and sustained and if it can lead to concerted action, avoiding ‘noises off’, there is the promise of success. The prize is moving the island’s system from one of the worst in the country to one of the best and thus ensuring a better-educated population for the future.

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School improvement – individual institutions within the maintained sector

5.1

While some early years’ work is of good quality, outcomes for children at the end of that stage are not good enough. Actions have been planned to address this and the action plan appears at Appendix 3.

5.2

The Ofsted inspection of the Local Authority’s school improvement work conducted between 10 June and 14 June 2013 was highly critical of the challenge offered to individual schools, the monitoring of their progress and the support available to them. It came to the

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judgement that the Authority did not know its schools well enough, how good or bad they were and in what ways and did not know in which direction they were going. There was, as well, insufficient capacity to offer, or broker, the sort of support to which schools should be entitled. This needs to be put right urgently. 5.3

Maintained schools received an initial visit from their Leadership and Learning Partner during July 2013 and this has been followed in September 2013 by a more formal visit that sought to establish a baseline in terms of the current position of the school and also to determine the level of support each requires, and the nature of that support. The visit is preceded by analysis of the school’s data and followed by a written report. Leadership and Learning Partners are school improvement professionals, many with long experience in that field, and some who are highly effective serving headteachers who have received additional training. This work has been offered free of charge to maintained schools but some academies that hold the funding for this service have elected to pay for it.

5.4

Of the schools visited 29% have been judged to need high support, 35% if schools with large deficits are included but are sound in terms of quality, 43% medium support and 22% low support. Schools that require low support may have issues to address but they are showing all the signs of being able to do that with limited guidance from outside. This is where the Authority would like all schools to be as quickly as possible. It wants to avoid a dependency culture and all the support that will be provided is focused on helping schools to become, and remain, effective under their own steam.

5.5

The visits have confirmed that there is a higher proportion of schools on the island that require support than there would be in other places but also that schools are, in the very vast majority of cases open to that support and, also, to the challenge that accompanies it. The main themes emerging where development is needed – though these are far from present as issues in every school – are: 

What constitutes high quality in a 21st century school



Expectations of what children can achieve



Developing leadership capacity at all levels including governance



Quality of teaching



Analysis of pupil focused data



Use of pupil focused data



Tracking pupil progress



Intervention if children are failing to keep up



Improvement focused classroom observation

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Improvement focused work scrutiny



School improvement planning.

5.6

Some schools are already financially committed to their current providers for services. For this financial year, 2013-14 maintained schools will subsidise the support being provided, in most cases. For future years, however, there is an expectation that they will need to pay for it. Only the core LLP programme will be funded by the Isle of Wight Council and that only for maintained schools. Academies are free to purchase it. .

5.7

Although 15% of the island’s schools are currently judged by Ofsted to be inadequate, there are more that are at risk of becoming inadequate. Discussions are currently taking place about those and the use of formal powers is being considered at the same time. Formal powers will not be used as a first resort but they will be used if the judgement is made that they provide the speediest route to improvement.

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School improvement strategy – inadequate schools becoming sponsored academies

6.1

All the schools on the island need to see themselves as part of the same system, improving together with none left behind. All educational leaders on the island need to see themselves as responsible together for the improvement of the whole system. It will not be enough for some parts to improve and others to stay the same or go backwards and it would not be healthy for the system for schools to see themselves as islands within an island. The relationships that the Authority has with academy sponsors and their schools have to be positive and have to be forged to drive systemwide improvement together. This is not always easy. Academy ‘chains’ have their own ways of doing things but these difficulties will need to be overcome through negotiation, centred always on what is best for the island’s children.

6.2

A good start has been made. The new school improvement team has been in discussion with the existing sponsors operating on the island and with potential new sponsors. There has been no resistance to working together and with some sponsors there has been an enthusiastic desire to be fully part of the whole system on the island. Information is being shared and discussions of strategies for improvement at individual school level are taking place.

6.3

There are regular meetings between the school improvement team, Ofsted and the Department for Education and these, too, have been helpful in coming to common understandings about what is needed. A position has been developed that recognises that while academies are autonomous and responsible for their own decisions, they educate the island’s children for whom the Director of Children’s Services and the Executive Lead Member also have responsibility.

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Some responsibilities and accountabilities are shared and it therefore makes sense to work together, not apart. 6.4

The Authority is working productively with the DfE broker and with other DfE officials to consider sponsored academy status for the four inadequate primary schools and two inadequate secondary schools that are not already sponsored. It is seeking, specifically, sponsors with a good track record in school improvement and in playing their full part within the local educational community. The Authority recognises the additional capacity that sponsoring trusts can bring and is eager to tap that capacity for what it can bring to the rest of the system on the island.

6.5

There are, however, particular pinch points in the relationship with academies and there will be more in the future. The attendance of children and young people, for example, needs to be improved across the island. In secondary schools it continues to be the worst in the country and it is also getting worse in primary schools. A common approach across the island, agreed and adhered to by all schools and supported by the Authority, is essential as a first stage in its improvement. The early signs are that it will be possible to negotiate such an approach because even though academies, in particular, do not have to enter into such arrangements, it clearly makes sense to them for them to do so.

6.6

Each school also has its own way of analysing and using its data. The Authority intends to share data more openly across the system in both the primary and secondary systems. The purpose is to identify island-wide strengths and weaknesses that are clear to all and to benchmark the attainment of the island’s children against those within the areas of statistical neighbours and across the country. All the data are already in the public domain but they are not currently shared. Although academy chains have their own processes and systems for handling and using data there is evidence that the sponsored academies on the island would nevertheless wish to be part of these data ‘clubs’ and contribute to the discussion around improvement strategies.

6.7

The school improvement team is ‘status blind’. The focus of its work is the impact of schooling on improving outcomes for children and developing successful adults. The status of the school, in that context, is somewhat irrelevant. The question is not ‘is it an academy?’ or ‘who sponsors it?’ but rather ‘how good is it?’, ‘how could it be better?’, ‘how can we share the good practice it has’ or ‘what can we do to help?’

6.8

When the large majority of the secondary schools on the island are sponsored academies and have the resource for school improvement that the Authority currently has for them, consideration will need to be given to finding the resource to maintain the partnership working.

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7

School improvement strategy – professional development

7.1

Considerable professional development will take place through the relationship between each Leadership and Learning Partner and headteachers and chairs of governors. In addition to the forensic analysis of schools’ strengths and weaknesses, the report writing and the brokering of support for areas that need work, the LLP is also charged with ‘adding value to schools thinking’ in particular in relation to the quality of teaching and the various processes leaders should have in place to make sure it is as good as it possibly can be. Additional capacity is being added to the LLP resource by involving effective headteachers on the island in the improvement of other island schools.

7.2

There will be professional development activity to support improved standards and progress in English and mathematics. Some of this will be free to schools. The details are being developed with individual schools.

7.3

The whole of the Hampshire professional development offer, through the Hampshire Teaching and Leadership College will be open to staff on the island on the same terms as for Hampshire heads, teachers, and non-teachers. The agreements and offers appear at Appendix 5a and 5b to show the work already done to make a much larger CPD offer available to the island’s schools and as an example of the way in which other services will be available too. This offer includes a substantial programme in leadership and management development and training, including programmes for new headteachers, existing headteachers, aspiring leaders and middle leaders and a wide variety of subject based development.

7.4

Isle of Wight headteachers are already taking part in the New Headteachers’ Induction Programme with colleagues on the mainland; Newly Qualified Teachers on the island are participating in the NQT programme and island governors in training alongside Hampshire governors. This participation is likely to grow and help considerably with the cross fertilisation of ideas and in breaking down a sense of isolation that the island’s staff and governors have sometimes felt.

7.5

A particular professional development programme for headteachers and chairs of governors will be launched in October 2013. It has been designed around the main themes identified during the school visits. All the activity and input into that programme will focus on ‘how to create and sustain a coherent whole-school system that delivers high achievement for all’. It will be delivered by Hampshire staff, teaching school colleagues, Ofsted colleagues, National and Local Leaders in education and will contain case studies of the most outstanding schools on the mainland – not just in Hampshire.

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7.6

It will offer practical solutions to issues evident in many of the island’s schools in the search for more of them to become good. It will focus on: 

how to monitor and evaluate school performance and the progress of children;



how to triangulate the evidence;



how to build intelligent accountability into the school, exposing the variations in the outcomes for different groups of pupils;



how to undertake sharply focused reviews of pupils’ work;



how to secure capacity through layers of leadership;



how to manage performance and tackle underperformance;



how to bring all this together in one system.

7.7

This will begin with one full-day session and then sub-groups will be formed to work on particular aspects in more depth.

7.8

Some facilitated time at the end of the full day’s session will be provided to co-construct the CPD programme for the next year to support rapid improvement within and across institutions.

7.9

Although the central strategy will be to improve the quality of teaching of teachers already on the island thought will be given to different ways to increase teacher supply. In particular the Authority has begun to negotiate with those involved in national initiatives such as Teach First and SCITT.

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School improvement strategy – governance

8.1

The island has had little capacity to support governing bodies until the beginning of the partnership with Hampshire. That capacity now exists and will be used to develop systems and processes so that the Authority has sufficient intelligence to support and challenge governance.

8.2

That intelligence will be used to inform decisions about which governing bodies to work with intensively and to identify any governors who may wish to work to support other schools.

8.3

The training offer to support the induction of new governors, chairs of governors in their role of leading the governing body and individual governors in effective governance will be improved and made more relevant to the island’s needs.

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8.4

The training and development of clerks to governing bodies will be improved, consistent with the offer already available to clerks in Hampshire, Somerset and Bath. Access will be provided to the management information package, Governor Manager.

8.5

The Service Level Agreement currently available to Hampshire schools, and taken up by schools in other areas, will be available of the same basis to schools on the island.

8.6

More comprehensive plans setting out the actions to be taken to support and improvement governance appear at Appendix 6.

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School improvement strategy – attendance

9.1

Compared with the rest of England school attendance is very poor and all the research evidence shows that, on average, the poorer the attendance the worse the attainment. Only 3% of young people who miss half their schooling achieve 5 A*- Cs GCSE including English and mathematics whereas 75% of them who attend for at least 95% of the time attain 5 A*-Cs. Children and young people who have a large amount of absence risk their futures. Improving school attendance is one of the island’s highest priorities.

9.2

Particular activities to address poor attendance have already been planned and are being carried out. They include: 

Work to produce a common approach to school absence across the community of the island’s schools, which is agreed by all and implemented consistently by all.



Work with parents and the wider community on the importance of good school attendance



The appointment of additional Local Authority staff (on fixed term contracts) to work with schools and families on tackling persistent absence



The establishment of a three tiered approach ranging from termly discussions where attendance is good through to intensive intervention where it is a serious cause for concern.



The development of better strategies to avoid exclusions from school.



Greater synergy between improving school attendance and the troubled families programme



Training for schools beginning on 24 October 2013



A bid to the Education Endowment Fund to support an island-wide project relating to attendance and the attainment of more disadvantaged children and young people.

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An exploration of the relationship between attendance on the island and the structure of the school year.

9.3

The intention is to halve the gap between the island’s absence rate and the national average in 2013-14 and eradicate it altogether by July 2016.

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Post 16 Provision

10.1

The outcomes for 18-19 year olds on the island are mixed. Although progression into post 16 is high, retention levels are less secure. Level 3 success is good for those who persist until the end of year 13 but the percentage of students who attain A* or A at A level is poor and progression into higher education is not good enough.

10.2

Each secondary school has sixth for provision although one is a shared 6th form. The Isle of Wight College, which is judged outstanding by Ofsted, also provides for post 16 students. To this will be added provision in the studio school in Cowes and, potentially, provision in the free school in the Ventnor area. There is considerable over-capacity and duplication in post 16 education on the island and the planned new provision will make this worse. There is a direct correlation between inefficiency and ineffectiveness. In many settings there are too few post 16 students to make a broad curriculum offer possible, too few students to make group sizes viable without funding them from the resource that should be used for pre 16 students and settings that are too small, in most cases, to produce the level of challenge that the students require.

10.3

Planning post 16 provision is not in the hands of the Local Authority and the Authority cannot impose solutions. There is, however, some evidence that the providers on the island would welcome further discussions to explore how more coherence could be brought to the offer for post 16 students and the quality improved. Those discussions will take place.

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Creating the space for rapid improvement

11.1

Chairs of governors and headteachers do not need their time consumed by activities that deflect them from their core business of achieving the best possible outcomes for children and young people. Circumstances have meant that much time in the recent past has been spent concerned about reorganisation and in procuring the best support services.

11.2

There are continuing issues around surplus places, despite the reorganisation, but the Authority does not wish to embark on another whole-scale reorganisation, intending instead to provide the time for school governors and leaders to concentrate on school improvement.

11.3

Similarly, the Authority intends to help schools with their procurement of services, in two ways. It will make available to any school that wants them the specification of the services that are sold to schools

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under Hampshire Service Level Agreements. It will also make those services available for sale to the island’s schools on the same terms as to Hampshire schools. Hampshire did not enter into the partnership with the Isle of Wight to market its services or to increase its market share. If the island schools want to purchase them, however, to release more time for their core business then the services will be available to them. 12

Wider partnerships and school improvement

12.1

The wider community’s influence needs to be brought to bear on the enterprise to improve educational attainment on the island. Most of the work in bringing together the ideas and energy of the island’s people will need to be done by the Authority not by individual schools. Most of those have enough to do in establishing the internal systems that will lead to improved quality and in undertaking the day-to-day work of school improvement without having to give time to island wide schemes. Nevertheless, such schemes will become important as time goes on.

12.2

Until the partnership with Hampshire, education was separated within the Council’s structure from the rest of the Council’s work. Already it is more central, part of a Children’s Services directorate and benefits need to be drawn from the synergy that brings. In particular, the Children and Young People’s Partnership – the Children’s Trust arrangements – and the Improvement Plan relating to safeguarding and services for children in care will, increasingly, focus on children as a whole, their health, their safety, their hopes and aspirations and the degree to which they take ownership for their own lives and futures. The other services, apart from education, need to understand their responsibility to play their part in improving educational outcomes, as happens in the best Children’s Services authorities. This is partly a matter of mindset – and positive mindsets can be developed by effective leadership and management.

12.3

This is not only a matter for the Council’s services. It extends to joint working with others, specifically those in the health services, and especially in connection with school attendance. GPs are important figures in the drive to reduce school absence especially since 74% of the recorded absence is explained by illness compared with 51% nationally. Joint working between headteachers and the local doctors’ practice has significantly improved school attendance in one area of south west Hampshire and that model will be introduced on the island.

12.4

Business and community leaders on the island want to see the standard of education improved and young people better equipped for work. They are keen to play their part and it will be important to work with them, harness their ideas for the development of the vision and strategy for the improvement of education on the island and to enlist their help in implementing that strategy.

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12.5

Consideration will be given to the development of an island-wide strategy seeking to help parents to support their children’s learning at various stages of their educational journey - through providing advice on how to help them to become ready for school, to supporting their early reading and progress through Key Stage 2, to strategies to assist them with learning in secondary schools, especially with homework and revision. Most of the material will be on-line and the work will be done in conjunction with schools but they will not be asked to shoulder the bulk of the burden.

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Conclusion

13.1

Education is in a parlous state on the island but the partnership between the Isle of Wight Council and Hampshire County Council has the promise of success. Children and young people can make better progress, attain higher standards and achieve more.

13.2

There is a sense of optimism on the island and a determination to do better. That needs to be built upon and lead to a commitment to improve – from the educational community and the wider community– that goes far beyond a mere desire to improve. Adults will need to expect more of the children and more of each other. Children will need to expect more of themselves.

13.3

In the period from September 2013 until April 2014, under the oversight of elected members, we will seek to harness the energy that is there and produce the second part of this plan that will set out the island’s vision and the island’s strategy, developed and agreed by the people who live there.

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