Agenda item

Purpose of the report:

To update the Select Committee on the work of Schools Alliance for Excellence (SAfE) during its second year of delivering school-improvement services.

Witnesses:

Julie Iles, Cabinet Member for All-Age Learning

Liz Mills, Director – Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture

Jane Winterbone, Assistant Director – Education

Maria Dawes, Chief Executive Officer, Schools Alliance for Excellence

Key points raised during the discussion:

1. The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Schools Alliance for Excellence (SAfE) introduced the report, summarising the key points. SAfE’s short-term priorities were as follows: providing reactive support to schools through the Covid-19 pandemic; safeguarding headteacher wellbeing; focusing on quality first teaching and working together to ensure best practice is shared; supporting and challenging vulnerable schools; the disadvantaged strategy; and working with the Local Authority to support the joint approach to inclusion.

2. SAfE was considering the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic on its school improvement contract and had subsequently amended its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) due to the cancellation of Key Stage and GCSE examinations in 2020 and 2021 –  as those qualifications had not been assessed in the ordinary way, attainment data was not comparable to previous years. 

3. A question was asked about the changes made to SAfE’s performance indicators in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lack of performance data and routine Ofsted inspections. The CEO responded that performance indicators were to be reviewed again in light of the third national lockdown and changes to the assessment of GCSE, AS and A-Level qualifications in 2021. SAfE was giving more prominence to disadvantaged and vulnerable children in the amended KPIs, with four of the six KPIs now focused on that cohort. SAfE was also trying to shift focus onto measurable outcomes for Key Stage 4. In 2021, SAfE would be able to compare the gap between the non-disadvantaged and disadvantaged cohort across Surrey.

4. A Member asked what the implications were of the cancellation of GCSE, AS and A-Level examinations in 2021. The CEO responded that, compared to 2020, exams had been cancelled earlier in the 2021 academic year, so SAfE had time to undertake a detailed consultation with schools to consider how best to assess Key Stage 4 and 5 children. The Director added that the Service was working on destination planning, supporting key stage transitions, and providing additional support for pathway planning for young people.

5. SAfE asked that all maintained schools complete a key-skills needs analysis, which was a self-assessment of schools’ strengths and areas of concern. SAfE was also working with the Service to identify vulnerable schools and was supporting an increased number of settings due to Covid-19. SAfE would also be identifying where more formal intervention could take place for those schools where little progress was perceived to have been made.

6. The Select Committee was informed of a number of key overarching issues in Surrey’s most vulnerable schools, as identified through the risk assessment process:  safeguarding; challenges for small schools; budgetary constraints; governance; Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and inclusion; and inexperienced leadership. SAfE was working with the council and Phase Councils to identify mitigating measures against all the aforementioned issues. 

7. Results for all Key Stage outcomes for Surrey’s disadvantaged children continued to be lower than this cohort nationally. Despite the significant amount of work undertaken by the council and Surrey’s schools, the gap was not reducing, and was likely to widen due to the impacts of Covid-19. SAfE worked with the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) on why the outcomes gap had not narrowed and the evidence highlighted a number of key reasons: in Surrey, 80% of children entitled to free school meals attended schools where less than 21% of pupils were entitled free school meals; disadvantaged children were spread out in small pockets across county, leading to an approach of individualised interventions. The EEF and Ofsted identified that a whole-school/whole-class approach was more effective at improving outcomes for disadvantaged children than individual intervention. The CEO identified three focus areas for SAfE going forward: ensuring all children accessed quality first teaching; ensuring all children were supported to develop their literacy and vocabularies with early language acquisition; and ensuring excellent curriculum design.

8. It was also noted that the gap in outcomes for disadvantaged pupils relative to their non-disadvantaged peers had not reduced. A Member asked why previous efforts to reduce this gap failed and how confident officers were that current approaches would be effective. The CEO responded that as there were few schools in Surrey with large cohorts of disadvantaged pupils, the majority of schools received small aggregate sums of pupil premium funding and had to adopt the approach of individualised interventions. Schools were now better at identifying their disadvantaged pupils, and SAfE was emphasising the effectiveness of adopting a whole class approach to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children. SAfE was also working with EEF around Quality First Teaching and ensuring literacy rates in young people, to enable access to the whole curriculum, whilst 32 of Surrey’s secondary schools had signed up for the secondary disadvantaged strategy work. The Director added that throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the council’s library services had put together a book offer for families to use at home. The culture box work targeted vulnerable and disadvantaged children in Surrey by providing learning resources that enabled them to attain and progress as their non-disadvantaged peers were able to.

9. The Cabinet Member stated that 94% of Surrey’s schools were currently rated good or outstanding, but Ofsted inspections and the Key Stage data would be impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. There were reports in the media of concerns that school closures might erase a decade of improvement made on closing the attainment gap. Surrey was ranked 54^th of 150 Local Authorities with regard to the disadvantage gap, whilst Key Stage 4 attainment was 17.4 points lower for Surrey’s disadvantaged students, compared to its non-disadvantaged cohort. Overall, Surrey’s disadvantaged pupils were not as well served as disadvantaged pupils nationally and the Cabinet Member acknowledged that this was not good enough.

10. A broad and balanced curriculum was key to improving outcomes for disadvantaged children and SAfE was looking at opportunities for innovative curriculum design whilst working to improve the consistency of school curricula across the county. Previously, Ofsted encouraged a focus on literacy and maths, but had shifted the focus of its school evaluation framework onto curricula and curriculum design. Some schools had limited capacity to develop other subjects, so SAfE was developing a recommended primary curriculum and provision of resources that could be easily adopted and opted into, for a fee, by schools. 

11. The impact that the third national lockdown was having on pupils’ education and development and the work of SAfE was explained. SAfE was working with schools to promote best practice with regard to remote learning and was supporting those settings that were struggling with the provision of high-quality, remote teaching. The CEO assured Members that the majority of schools were providing a much-improved, high level of learning and were focusing on the most vulnerable children.  Children who did not engage with remote learning during the previous lockdowns were invited to attend school, and schools remained open with up to 30% of children on site. The CEO chaired a Task Group that had focused on ameliorating the attainment gap and which was now looking at how schools could best use their Covid-19 catchup funding to support children. The Assistant Director informed Members that there was also a multiagency Task Group that focussed on how best to support schools in managing children and young people with mental health and wellbeing concerns, in light of the increased number of referrals to the Single Point of Access.

12. A Member asked how many times SAfE had escalated safeguarding issues to the council during the previous 12 months, what the main safeguarding issues were, and how the council responded. The Assistant Director responded that, in the previous calendar year, up to three safeguarding issues were escalated to the council. The Assistant Director met regularly with the Local Authority Designated Officer to discuss thematic issues arising from referrals. All schools were asked to undertake a safeguarding audit, which the Service was quality assuring through dip sampling. Working with designated safeguarding leads, the Service was emphasising the importance of a safeguarding culture and promoting an annual report to governors on the key indicators around safeguarding. The CEO stated that some individual schools commissioned external safeguarding reviews which were not as robust as they should be, nor within the council’s control. These reviews could give a misleading level of assurance to governors about the quality of safeguarding in their school.

13. A Member asked what was being done to improve the “inexperienced leadership” in some Surrey schools, as noted in the report. The CEO explained that the low number of applications for headships in Surrey was problematic and Covid-19 pandemic had exacerbated this problem, leading to a number of the appointment of a number of inexperienced headteachers. In response, SAfE launched a new programme for early career headteachers, strengthened the new headteacher induction programme, introduced the deputy heads network, and provided a series of support through Heads Up. The CEO expected a number of headteachers to retire or leave their positions following the Covid-19 pandemic, which would increase the challenge of recruiting high-quality replacements.

14. Members were informed that the sustainability work being undertaken with small schools, as detailed in the report, was around viability and budget pressures. The Assistant Director explained that the national funding formula removed lump-sum funding for schools whilst pupil-led funding resulted in considerably tighter budgets for smaller schools. It was important for the Local Authority to work with these schools on how best to tackle these budgetary issues.

15. Members queried why 24% of Surrey schools did not subscribe to SAfE. The CEO responded that schools opted out for varying reasons; some schools preferred to work individually and did not engage with the Phase Councils. SAfE was communicating the importance of joint working to non-subscriber schools to encourage them to subscribe to SAfE and build a more inclusive school community.

Recommendations:

1. The Select Committee note the work that SAfE has made over the last term particularly supporting schools through the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. That the Select Committee note the on-going support to improve outcomes for disadvantaged pupils.

3. The mitigations to address the issues identified by the risk assessment process are embedded and monitored by SAfE and the Local Authority.