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| Counterblast Is Every Child Mattering? Sylvia McNamara Click here for a print version of this article. The term Every Child Matters is seductive. No one surely can resist agreeing. Yes, we all think that every child matters, but what are the implications of this? The emotional and social cost of the way we do things now There is an emotional and social cost to the way we do things at the moment for children. We know that there are very vulnerable children who do badly at school: Looked After Children, children with learning disabilities, African Caribbean boys. These groups of youngsters not only do not achieve well academically and are more likely to be excluded, but they fare even worse after school. We also know that failing such children is expensive for society, both during their teenage years but especially in adulthood. Those who fail at school are more likely to commit crimes and end up in reform institutions or prison. In addition, there is an emotional and social cost for society. 'Crime and Grime' are the two aspects of living in cities that citizens cite over and again in local surveys as contributing to their feelings of being unsafe, and therefore unhappy with what they regard as legitimate local and national government services. The elderly, in particular, feel very threatened by the anti-social behaviour of those who have not succeeded in education and who start to demonstrate their frustration through their noisy or even threatening street behaviour. If we were able to change the outcomes for the most vulnerable children we would also change the outcomes for other citizens. We know that interventions after the event are expensive, that intervening at a young age, for example with pre-school, nursery and reception age children, is less costly than intervening with teenagers. Yet funding in the education system is clearly stacked in favour of post-16 pupils, with an ever diminishing amount available as the children get younger. In order to ensure that intervention is both timely and cost-effective, are we really prepared to change our funding systems to children in schools so that the younger receive more? Taking risks to do things differently Some interventions seem to be remarkably successful. In Birmingham recently I was privileged to attend the final live performance of 'Romeo and Juliet' which was the culmination of the eighteen month project titled Ballet Hoo! The performance grew out of a project which has allowed young people to make transformations in their lives, attitudes and skills through personal development and dance. Phase One of the project involved working with 200 young people, who were identified as having talent in dance or expressed a desire to be taught dance. A therapeutic organisation and one hundred life coaches were available to provide support. This phase culminated in an initial performance. Phase Two involved some 80 young people who were part of the final performance of 'Romeo and Juliet'. The project cost over a million pounds and arose from a partnership of Youth at Risk, Channel Four's Diverse Productions, Birmingham Royal Ballet and the local authorities of Birmingham, Dudley, Wolverhampton and Sandwell. The key to the success of this project seemed to be the combination of:
In Birmingham we have speculated about the 'savings' that investment in such a project for our 2,050 Looked After Children and our 680 young people in alternative education could bring about. It is not only cost effective in terms of the here and now, but also in the long term. When we succeed in turning around a young person's life so that they no longer fight against the community in which they live, but rather make a positive contribution to that community and develop a sense of economic well being, we are more or less ensuring that the next generation is less vulnerable and more confidently creative too. Management of change: the big people agenda Decisions to redirect resources in this way seem high risk at the time. We have to find additional resources to fund the new project, and continue with the old way of doing things until the new way proves itself to be successful over a discernable period. The impact of such decisions is twofold. One, the more obvious, is ensuring a better set of outcomes for a young person or group of young people. The second is, inevitably, that a group of adults who are employed currently to work with young people in a particular way (in a special school or a special unit, or in an additional resources base) will need to work in a different way, possibly in a different setting, and possibly with fewer of them. This implies that this group of adults needs to include a wider range of experiences and skills: life coaches, artists, therapists for example. It is this aspect of the management of change that seems to be most difficult and the aspect that has received very little publicity. To do things differently is a 'big people' agenda as well as a 'little people' agenda. Managing adults through change which requires them to do things differently is exhausting and challenging. This may mean that some adults - headteachers, senior leaders in schools, care workers - will retreat from change and stay with the way they have always done things. There is, after all, enough work and exhaustion in doing things the same way, without consciously and overtly trying to do things differently and thus inviting yet more personal challenge. A third consequence of redirecting resources is likely to result in less investment for those who are currently doing relatively well in the school system. This could well create opposition from the young people, their parents, and some school leaders unless we also change the way that this group can better access opportunities and routes for learning. There are good reasons to explore this option. Transforming education Birmingham is embarking on a whole-scale review of the curriculum, both the curriculum offered and the way youngsters are taught, to support young people to access learning in ways which best meet their needs. There are some key national changes in secondary education that we are using as levers to bring about change. One involves the introduction of the new specialised Diplomas beginning in 2008. This demands a level of specialism by secondary schools, and a collaboration between schools on an unprecedented scale to ensure that the range of high quality specialist provision is available to all. The proposed structure of the Diplomas also allows for the possibility of a different approach to timetabling and curriculum modelling. Whole-day placements in other settings for those who opt for Specialised Diplomas will have an impact on the timetabling of the core subjects for all pupils. Another lever for change is the Academies programme. In Birmingham, we are to develop seven Academies to work with their six Area Networks. These networks are groups of schools making up the 76 secondary schools across the city. Each Birmingham Academy will have a business organisation as its main sponsor linked to one of the commercial growth sectors. In this way, each Academy will develop a different specialism. This will allow a more strategically managed relationship between businesses, other organisations and schools than currently exists. The transformation that headteachers of secondary schools and Birmingham businesses want to see is that more 'real-life' problem solving experiences are effectively included as essential elements of the core curriculum. This could mean a cohort of students taking responsibility for the production of a local journal as part of their English course, or the design of a media facility for the community for their maths GCSE work. We know from examples of these close links between curriculum and real-life work in the USA and Australia that there can be significant improvements in attendance, perseverance and commitment of the young people. All young people gain these attributes, including the most vulnerable. These are also the very attributes employers seek. Additionally, these closer strategic links with local businesses could lead to more work experience and work-based learning on school sites. This would mean that young people would gain a greater awareness of what is possible in the world of work. Conversations with young people indicate that this is necessary. Among the biggest employers in Birmingham are the Healthcare Trusts. Most young people still think this means doctors and nurses whereas in fact hospitals are like small towns requiring helicopter pilots, florists, accountants, construction workers, chefs, and personnel workers. We know that once young people realise what is possible in the world of work and, through work experiences, decide on a career, they become more motivated to achieve. When Lady Macmillan came on stage at the end of Ballet Hoo!, she spoke movingly and powerfully of the fact that the young people, through the work that resulted in their performance, had developed the skills and attributes of discipline and commitment. With these skills they could do, and succeed in, virtually anything they wanted and that no-one could take these skills away from them. The audience erupted. Family and friends of the young people knew this to be true. Working collaboratively This close work with the business sector or arts organisations brings with it
In addition, it may be advantageous to primary age pupils to spend some time in other settings: residential experiences with other schools and work experiences in other schools. In this way, primary schools could develop specialisms that all children in their area could benefit from. In Birmingham, the concept of 'extended schools' is typically groups of five to six schools which form the basis of the childcare offer in that locality. As part of our Primary Pathfinder initiative for capital funding, we shall be exploring ways in which curriculum specialisms - design, music, sports, languages - can be developed in the extended schools cluster, and pilot ways in which young people can access these. This includes:
The ethos of the school has been seen as a hallmark of an effective school, but something that is unique to one school can be susceptible to erosion if the children start to move from school to school. The next step to ensure that Every Child Matters becomes a reality for all learners could be for schools in a cluster to work together to establish common rights and responsibilities. These would be taught to all children in the individual schools, and then become the expected norm as behaviours from all the children, regardless of the physical setting, so that there are shared, explicit aspects of ethos that everyone, adults included, adhere to. Clearly, collaboration between schools - rather than competition - is needed for young people to benefit from the group of local schools in their area. In Birmingham, high levels of collaboration and collegiality have been developed between groups of primary schools and groups of secondary schools. However, in furthering this collaborative approach we are not helped by the government's current line on admissions and parental preferences: less popular schools to expand and failing schools to close. In Birmingham we have taken the view that for every child to matter there needs to be:
We have 76 secondary schools in Birmingham. We had 30 schools below the 30% GCSE floor target five years ago. This year, we had no school below the 25% floor target and only three schools below the 30% floor target. The effect of this is that parents are starting to prefer their community school and we are not closing any mainstream secondary schools. Changing universal services This approach to transformation is about changing universal services. In Birmingham, we are using another driver to bring about this change: the capital funding for schools. There are three additional sources of funding for buildings at the moment:
Let me return at this point to Ballet Hoo! As I have already mentioned, Ballet Hoo! relied on three components that could provide a model for this reformed curriculum and learning environment:
There needs to be a sufficiently high degree of partnership work that enables young people of all ages to stay in an environment that challenges and builds self discipline and commitment, whilst at the same time providing support to confront underlying issues and draw on the structured support of peers to develop resilience. From the Ballet Hoo! experience, this is evidently not just an effective way forward for young people of all ages, it is also a realistic way of achieving the transition from universal, targeted, specialist services separation to a more blended universal service, supported by specialists. This has to be the ideal to aim for. Any specialist or targeted service that remains separate runs the risk that the young person thinks she or he is different, not normal, and develops low self worth or learned helplessness. These life coaches and therapists could in turn be the young people themselves. What if we developed a stream of assistant lunchtime supervisors, assistant teaching assistants, assistant learning mentors? We know from the research on peer mentoring how much young people gain from helping others in such situations. They grow mentally, emotionally and socially, they increase in self esteem and locus of control, becoming more mature, reliable and confidant. Changing the adult role The real challenge here again is with the adults. To realise such visions, a change needs to happen in the relationship between teachers and pupils. It needs to shift from 'parent to child' to 'adult to adult'. As long as we expect young people to behave badly and unreliably, to need adults to police them, then they will behave accordingly. However, if we
This does mean moving away from the current situation of many classrooms where the delineation of power, authority and responsibility is very clear and is in reality with the adults. In this situation, for young people to take the initiative is not easy. This shift in the relationship between pupils and teachers whereby pupils are empowered, trusted and given more responsibility is not just a challenge for teachers. If every child is really going to matter and universal services are to become more personalised, then young people of all ages need to gain access to the therapeutic and mentoring support they need. This must mean that more adults need to work alongside young people in the universal setting rather than in a specialist setting. Work with other partners – health, voluntary sector, police - needs to be so strong that real collaborative work alongside the youngster can take place. Currently, this is rare in Birmingham and not significantly in evidence in other parts of the country. Most partnership work takes place in specialist settings not universal mainstream settings. So again we are back to the issue of adults changing their practice and, sometimes for the first time, effectively co-operating with other professions and players. Our experience in Birmingham is that radical shifts in curriculum models which build in partnership working from the outset - such as the very successful Creative Partnerships - mean that pupils are more likely to be motivated to learn than they would be with a merely 'bolt-on' approach. Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of special needs. The best practice in Birmingham classrooms is when it is difficult to know who are the teachers and who are the learning assistants, because they are all working effectively alongside children. The least good practice is when a teacher is clearly in charge, usually standing by or at the front of the class, and the assistants are standing in a huddle looking for an opportunity to talk to each other. The former is a strategic collaborative approach to planning; the latter is the bolt on approach. Every child is mattering In the meantime, before such a vision is actually implemented there is clearly a need for:
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