Government pledges extra sport for schools

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport announced an increase in funding for school sports.

Key points:
- By 2012 high quality coaching and competition will be on offer to all school children in all the main sports like cricket, tennis and athletics.
- Sport England also announced the first phase of government plans to offer young people more sport outside of school. The £36 million ‘Sport Unlimited’ scheme is designed to attract into sport those young people who do not take part in sport regularly. It will set up 4000 taster sessions across England in non-traditional sports, including cycling, sailing, kayaking, American football and dodgeball. The nationwide scheme will be available from the beginning of this new school term.
- The extra investment was put in to offer all 5-16 year olds five hours of government funded sport a week, two in school and three out. All 16-19 year olds will be offered three hours of out of school sport a week.

Family Nurse Partnership programme

This report commissioned by the DCSF and Department for Health examined the first year effects of the pilot Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) programme found that the scheme can be successful but further development is needed.

The pilot is based on a model developed in the USA by Professor David Olds, it is an evidence-based nurse home-visiting programme designed to improve the health, well-being and self-sufficiency of young first-time parents and their children. It involves weekly or fortnightly structured home visits by a specially trained nurse from early pregnancy until children are 24 months old. The curriculum is well specified and detailed with a plan for the number, timing and content of visits. Supervision is ongoing and careful records of visits are maintained. The programme has strong theoretical underpinnings, with the formation of a strong therapeutic relationship between nurse and mother at its heart. The programme is designed for low-income mothers who have had no previous live births and starts in the second trimester of pregnancy.

Key points:
- The conditions of being a test site, learning the programme and demands of the tight set up timetable i.e. birth clustered around same time.
- There were wider demands on Family Nurses’ time from organisation and multi-agency working.
- There were challenges in providing this service within the UK context, with national health care, compared to the USA.
- There was a lack of integration between maternity and child health services.
- The FNP reached those who are likely to benefit most and the current eligibility criteria of all 19 years and under first time births should continue. Any further testing of the FNP with non-teenage mothers should focus on 20 to 22 year olds.
- The FNP is acceptable to first-time, young mothers but attrition during pregnancy exceeded the fidelity target in some sites. Further work is needed to understand why clients refuse or leave the programme.
- The FNP seems acceptable to fathers. The evaluation found that fathers:
• Participated in visits;
• Used programme activities;
• Valued the learning on prenatal development, diet and smoking, and preparation for labour and delivery; and
• FNs reported that many clients requested materials for fathers who could not be present, and conveyed questions that fathers had asked about the FNP programme.
- FNs recognised the benefits of using a structured programme, developing a different kind of relationship with clients, using new skills and reaching real need.

Parenting in ordinary families

This JRF report examined the literature around parenting.

Key points:
- Research into cultural differences and similarities in parenting indicates that aspects of parenting relevant to all cultures include parental sensitivity to the child’s needs, socialisation towards cultural norms and support for the child’s need for autonomy across time. The parenting to which a child is exposed may act as a buffer against adversity if it is warm and supportive or, alternatively, it may increase the risk of poor child outcomes if it is hostile or rejecting.
- Within the literature, a variety of parenting themes have emerged but those which recur consistently include sensitivity towards the needs of the child, management of the child’s behaviour and qualities of the parent–child relationship, including warmth and support, hostility and rejection.
- There is evidence that childhood anti-social behaviour increases in conjunction with increases in physical punishment but another school of thought proposes that, as long as its use is rare and only backs up other types of discipline, the effects of physical punishment may be beneficial.
- Much of the literature has focused on the parenting undertaken by mothers but it is important that paternal parenting is also examined.
- Although there were some aspects of parenting which were affected by factors which are immutable (maternal age, education and ethnic group), these were few and far between. Younger parents were more likely to be ambivalent about the timing of the child’s arrival but older mothers were more likely to report that they felt less fulfilled and that they had less time for themselves.
- Mothers who had spent fewer years in formal education reported that, on the whole, they felt less confident in caring for the child and they were less likely to report that they spent time teaching the child. It is difficult to draw any firm conclusions with respect to the effects of ethnic group on parenting.
- Parenting varies little by ethnic group, maternal age or education and that on the whole parenting is warm and supportive in all groups.
- There was a large amount of variation in parenting across time: parenting remained stable for fewer than one in five families. In part, this is likely to be a function of the increasing age of the child.
- The factors which had the most influence regarding changes in parenting score were mother’s mental and physical health. Deteriorations in health were associated with reduced parenting scores and, in contrast to all other variables, improvements in health predicted increased scores.

Analysis of Children & Young People's Plans

This NFER paper follows similar reports in recent years which summarises the main trends emerging from Local Authorities (LAs) Children and Young People's plans. This analysis is based on a representative sample of 50 LA plans.

Key points:
- Current priorities to LAs are commissioning, safeguarding and looked after children. The plans format and presentation was also analysed.
- On commissioning: half of LAs referred to commissioning, with a big focus on the development of a commissioning strategy since 2006. Where joint commissioning teams where mentioned they mostly referred to Primary Care Trusts and Council or LA teams. Most were commissioning by service, whilst some are commissioning by ECM area. CAMHS is the priority area for joint commissioning and looked after children are the priority group.
- On safeguarding: the priorities were child protection, closely followed by violence and abuse with all LAs reporting they had a Local Safeguarding Children's Board in place.
- On looked after children: the priority was on ensuring participation of looked after children in service planning and reviews; improving placement quality, stability and choice; educational attainment and improving health. With regards ECM the focus was on "staying safe" and "enjoy and achieve".
- Format and presentation (this analysis relates to 106 plans): plans are either highly designed or mainly word-processed (about half each). The average length has grown by an additional 22 pages to 74 pages since 2006, but there is wide variation in the length of plans. 69% of plans used pictures etc. (I think this is enough on this here, if you want more read the report).

External factors for school success

This Audit Commission report from November 2006 focuses on the external factors to school success, rather than the internal ones. It also offers examples of practice and tools to assess effectiveness. Drawing on research from 12 councils, serving deprived areas, the authors concentrate on regeneration and renewal; social housing; community safety; arts, sports and recreation; and youth services.

Key points:
- School improvement and renewal are inseparable issues from neighbourhood improvement and renewal, particularly in the most disadvantaged areas.
- Community safety partnerships and agencies can work with schools to help tackle crime and antisocial behaviour, both in and out of school, thus contributing to neighbourhood renewal and supporting high aspirations and educational achievement in school.
- Housing conditions affect children’s health and ability to learn; and the profile of housing stock in an area affects the intake of a whole school and very often the performance of its pupils.
- Arts, sports and recreation services can support schools in many ways. They may provide additional facilities or resources to deliver the curriculum. They may help build children’s confidence and self esteem in a different context from the classroom, and give disaffected young people a more constructive alternative to crime and antisocial behaviour.
- Making effective use of both universal and targeted youth services can help to foster more successful schools, through linking young people to wider opportunities for personal and social development, and helping to tackle the root causes of underachievement and disaffection through individual support.

Australian - Brighter Futures Intervention programme

Brighter Futures is an Australian voluntary program that provides targeted support tailored to meet the needs of vulnerable families with children aged under nine years or who are expecting a child. Brighter Futures provides families with the necessary services and resources to help prevent an escalation of emerging child protection issues. It aims to strengthen parenting and other skills to promote the necessary conditions for healthy child development and well being. This report provides a baseline of activity in the Program up to September 2007.

Key points:
- The Brighter Futures children are typically under the age of six with a strong representation in the age group of two to four years. More than a third of the children had a medical condition and half of the children had a development delay.
- Nearly half of the children were identified to require intervention for behavior problems. Most of the children also had socio-emotional problems.
- Warmth, hostile parenting and consistency were three dimensions of parenting that had been identified in previous research as having an important impact on children’s subsequent health and development. Parental warmth was identified to significantly correlate with children’s behavior score. On average, the Brighter Futures parents scored slightly higher on the hostile parenting measure than the Australian population as a whole.
- On average, the primary carers assessed themselves as a ‘better than average parent’. However 13 per cent of participants stated that they had some trouble or were not very good at being a parent, compared to less than two per cent of the overall Australian population.
- More than half of the primary carers stated that they sometimes felt that they needed support but could not get it from anyone and 37 % stated that they often or very often felt that way.
- Primary carers demonstrated high levels of satisfaction with the services and the amount of service they received from the Brighter Futures program.

Well being in primary school

The Centre for the research of the Wider Benefits of Learning has conducted a study which examined four dimensions of well-being: mental health; pro-social behaviour; anti-social behaviour and achievement.

Key findings:
- Most children experience positive well-being in primary school. Between the ages of 8 and 10, there is an overall increase in levels of well-being. However, 20 per cent suffer from either declining or low levels of well-being from 8 to 10 years. This subset is most likely to be male, from low socioeconomic-status (SES) backgrounds and low achieving.
- It is children’s individual experiences such as bullying, victimisation and friendships, and their beliefs about themselves and their environment, which mainly affect their well-being, rather than school-level factors such as type of school. There is an element of continuity in these measures; and a high level of interrelatedness within and between the dimensions measured.
- School factors explain 3 per cent or less of the variation in pupils’ mental health and behaviour, 7 per cent of the variation in Key Stage 2 (age 11) maths scores and 10 per cent of the variation in KS2 English scores. These differences between schools are explained by factors such as school disadvantage and school ethos.
- It is children’s individual experiences within schools which are most important. Children experience a very different environment, even within the same school, based on their own individual interactions with peers and teachers.
- Socio-demographic factors, with the exception of gender, have no effect on children’s pro-social and antisocial behaviours, although they do affect school achievement.
- Boys have better mental health than girls, with higher levels of belief in their own abilities and more feelings of control. However, boys are less likely to engage in pro-social, and more likely to engage in antisocial, behaviours.
- Much of the variation in children’s well-being remains unexplained. It is likely that the unmeasured cumulative experiences of children within their home and school are important constituents of their overall well-being.