New Relationship with Schools Policy

This Research Brief presents the summative findings from the national evaluation of the New Relationship with Schools (NRwS) policy.

The policy, announced in 2004, was recognition of the need to streamline and improve the relationship between the then Department for Education and Skills (DfES), Local Authorities (LAs) and schools; ensure closer alignment of national and local priorities; and address ‘bureaucracy’ as an ongoing area of concern at both the primary and secondary phases of education.

Key points:
- The evaluation demonstrates that a number of the strands of NRwS, both independently and collectively, have supported a move towards the intelligent accountability framework envisaged when the policy was first announced. There is also evidence that these developments are contributing to improvements in quality and standards for some schools and LA areas, particularly in the secondary sector.
- The outcomes achieved place LAs and schools in a good position to respond to some of the challenges set out in the recently published Children’s Plan, including those associated with preventative school support, challenge for coasting schools, improving attainment for specific groups and engaging parent’s in their child’s learning.
- There is a need for continued efforts at national level to work towards more coherent
policy development and delivery across all ECM services and ensure schools have the capacity and necessary support to respond to the significant developments currently affecting the sector. There is also the potential for greater value to be achieved from addressing some aspects of consistency and effectiveness associated with school self-evaluation, data availability and the School Improvement Partner (SIP) programme.

Raising Education Achievement and Breaking the Cycle of Inequality

This OECD report examined the two big strategic objectives which the government has for education policy (as outlined in the Public Sector Agreements). This report compares recent policy against international standards.

Key points:
- Whereas the UK often ranks very highly on certain measures of economic policy and outcomes, this is certainly not the case when it comes to educational standards.
- The test-dominated education system in the United Kingdom has pioneered the use of school benchmarking techniques and the use of targets to raise school quality. However, targets may have biased some national measures of education performance, and there is relatively little evidence of improvement in performance when evaluated using international tests of cognitive ability, such as PISA and PIRLS.
- Socio-economic background plays an important role in explaining education performance, and the government has tried to address this through the use of funding formulas which direct additional resources to areas with a higher proportion of pupils from deprived backgrounds. There has been some improvement in the most disadvantaged schools but pupils in the middle and lower half of the distribution continue to perform particularly poorly relative to students in countries with the best performing education systems.
- One explanation may be that local authorities and schools are not distributing deprivation funds as intended by the central government, resulting in outcomes which can be seen as inequitable. Stronger measures may be required to correct this imbalance.

The paper makes the following recommendations:
• Increase regular participation in quality early childhood education, and continue to target childcare services provided by Sure Start Children’s Centres to disadvantaged families. Sustained intervention once disadvantaged children have entered primary school will also be required, to ensure that the benefits of pre-school interventions are sustained.
• Continue to promote a focus on the acquisition of core literacy and numeracy skills for pupils at primary and secondary school.
• Ensure that the focus on core skills is not compromised by the goal of expanding the average number of years of schooling. Emphasise the role of core literacy and numeracy skills within the new Diplomas. Consider introducing a higher age for compulsory participation only for those students who have not already achieved a certain minimum standard of core skills by age 16.
• Evaluate returns to the new diplomas closely. When A-levels are reviewed vis-à-vis the new Diplomas in 2013, give serious consideration to moving towards a more unified framework of qualifications as originally recommended by the Tomlinson report.
• Ensure continued participation in international tests of cognitive ability, such as PISA and PIAAC.
• Reduce the focus on testing and targets and put more focus on supporting weak students and schools.
• Design all remaining targets in a way that limits the potential for gaming, by ensuring an interactive performance management system that captures the complexity of the education process. Ensure that remaining key performance measures are not based on targeted outputs.
• Encourage a public debate about whether the goal of the education system should be to make all schools high performers, and what societal values that would reflect.
• Consider ways of encouraging the highest quality teachers to move to the most disadvantaged schools – such as by giving bonuses for high quality teaching performance at such schools.
• Promote a national benchmark formula for local authorities to use in allocating funding between schools, while still permitting flexibility (i.e. deviation from the benchmark formula) to meet local needs.
• Promote the transition to a more efficient allocation of funds by providing standard procedures for taking deprivation-targeted funding out of the formula used to determine the Minimum Funding Guarantee.
• Evaluate the pros and cons of introducing a differentiated voucher system of funding (as in Chile) where pupils from poorer families receive vouchers that are valued more highly than those for the general population.
• Encourage more research into determining which resource mixes within schools are most successful at narrowing socio-economic gaps.

Expansion of primary literacy and numeracy pilots

The DCSF have expanded their flagship literacy and numeracy initiatives:

Every Child a Reader - by 2010/11 this will cover to 30,000 children in 3,000 schools (and 150 local authorities) a year struggling with early reading getting extra support. A recent report from the Institute of Education found that the pilot had been a huge success, with children getting higher than average results for their age. Within Yorkshire & Humber Every Child A Reader is being expanded this year to: Bradford, Kingston Upon Hull, Leeds, Sheffield, Wakefield & Kirklees.

Every Child Counts - being piloted in 21 local authorities from this month and then rolled out over the next two years, so that by 2010/11 30,000 children in 1,900 schools (105 local authorities) will be covered. Within Yorkshire & Humber Every Child Counts will be initially piloted in: Leeds & Bradford.

Every Child a Writer - being piloted in nine local authority areas, a total of 135 schools and 2,500 children, from this month and will be rolled out nationally by 2011 so that it covers over 45,000 children in up to 9,000 schools and 150 local authorities. Despite the improvements in numeracy and literacy over the last decade, writing lags behind early reading improvement rates. No local authorities within Yorkshire & Humber are piloting this initiative.

Every Child Counts, like the established Every Child a Reader programme, focuses on the bottom 5% at Key Stage 1 and will mean that children struggling with early maths are given high quality intensive specialist support from trained teachers.

HE; Academies; State Boarding Schools & New Schools

The DCSF are on a mission to have every university in the country supporting a local academy school. Currently more than half of the 88 universities are committed and a further 20 are developing towards supporting an academy.

For more and a full list of which academies and universities are involved click here.

The hope is that with the raising of the educational age to 17 by 2013 and 18 by 2015, that links to universities will encourage young people who had never considered a university education to stay on post 18.

The academic year 2008 witnessed the opening of over 180 new schools, including 51 new Academies (taking the total number of academies to 134). Many opened as part of the "Building Schools for the Future" programme, including a purpose-built multi-faith centre which will be used by all members of the community at Allerton High in Leeds.

These new schools includes 5 new "all through" academies, schools which provide a seamless primary and secondary education, taking the total of such schools to 14, with a further 5 in development.

Additionally, the DCSF have announced two new academies will eventually take boarding students, with a focus on those students from the armed services in Lincoln and Salisbury Plain.
This comes on top of additional funds aimed to expand the places at state boarding schools aimed at vulnerable children, such as those looked after by the local authorities.

Draft legislation: Children's Trusts; Sure Start; Pupil Groups; Apprenticeships; Wellbeing; School Buildings; Admissions

In the last three months (June-September) there have been ten draft legislation pieces open for consultation from the DCSF alone. These are listed below, in order of initial publication.

Admissions - a technical area, so best reading the document if interested.
Pupil wellbeing - educational establishments are required to promote pupil wellbeing, this is draft guidance as to how they could achieve.
Schools causing concern - proposed changes on how to deal with schools which cause concern.
Strengthening Children's Trusts - proposals aimed at making the Children's Trust the main strategic body for children's services.
Zero carbon schools - calls for evidence so the government can realise their 2016 target.
Apprenticeships - steps to legislate for the provision of apprenticeships, including making the LSC ensure apprenticeships exist.
Draft guidance on safeguarding children from sexual exploitation.
Draft guidance for children not receiving a suitable education.
Under performing groups - changes to which groups of children are monitored reducing the overall number but including pupils on free school meals for the first time.
Sure Start Children's Centres - legislation to make this provision a legal requirement.

Equity within education

This is the third report on the state of equity in the English education system from the Centre for Equity in Education based at The University of Manchester. It argues that efforts to create a more equitable education system are now at a strategic crossroad – trapped between a target-driven ‘effectiveness and improvement’model of service reform, and efforts to develop localised and coordinated responses to inequity.

Key findings:
- The report argues that if equity is to be enhanced, the space must be created for policies to be joined up locally and oriented to meeting community needs.
- Despite repeated policy interventions, the most disadvantaged children and young people continue to be at greatest risk of impoverished educational experiences, low achievements and limited life chances.
- Policy has focused on ‘improving’ schools and other education settings and making them more ‘effective’, yet the source of inequities lies largely beyond the school, in social disadvantage. Efforts at educational improvement have to be linked into a coherent strategy to address wider social and economic issues.
- There is currently more potential than ever before to achieve greater equity within the English education system. In particular, we find that multiple co-ordinating mechanisms exist in the form of Local Strategic Partnerships, neighbourhood management initiatives, integrated children’s service networks, extended services clusters and the like. In practice, however, these deliver little by way of co-ordinated strategies that might address educational inequity.
- Often, these co-ordinating mechanisms have little effective involvement from schools and wider community stakeholders. Even where they do, their ability to generate strategy is hamstrung by the perverse consequences of the government’s target-setting regime. Participants are accountable for separate sets of targets, and have to achieve these within short timescales.
- Despite this, there are examples of more genuine collaboration. These are characterised by a contextual analysis leading to a local strategy. Participants probe beneath the surface of headline performance indicators to understand how local dynamics shape particular outcomes.
- If these approaches are to flourish, action is needed at three levels:
• Head teachers and other education leaders need to:
− be proactive in joining and forming partnerships with other key actors in the areas they serve
− work with their partners to understand ‘how things work round here’ and to formulate a long-term area strategy to tackle inequities
− harmonise work within their schools and settings with this wider strategy.
• Local authorities and other local leaders need to:
− promote the development of partnerships at area level
− offer support to partnerships for contextual analysis and strategy formulation
− develop their own contextual analyses and strategies as a framework within which area partnerships can operate
− bring a democratic voice to bear on the work of area partnerships.
• Central government needs to:
− continue to create spaces in which local partnerships can flourish
− encourage these partnerships to undertake contextual analyses and formulate long-term strategies
− counter the perverse consequences of the target-setting regime by locating accountability at the level of the partnership, entering into dialogue about local goals, and extending the timescale over which achievements are measured and the range of evidence this involves
− develop its own contextual analyses and strategies as a framework within which local authorities and area partnerships can operate.

Parental views of schools

A representative sample of parents with children in English schools were consulted on their views of their child's education in January 2008 for this DCSF report.

Key points:
- Most parents were satisfied with the their child's school, with 73% being very or extremely satisfied:

- Parents who said they were dissatisfied were asked why they had said this. The main issues highlighted by these parents were poor quality teaching (mentioned by 37% of dissatisfied parents), problems with discipline, bullying or other forms of antisocial behaviour (34%), and poor academic standards or exam results (28%). Poor quality special needs provision was also an issue for a substantial minority of dissatisfied parents (21%).
- Parents were also asked how good they thought their child’s school was at dealing with parents’ concerns effectively. About three fifths (58%) of parents described the school as very good at this, with a further 29% saying it was fairly good.
- When asked for the most important factors when choosing a new school the majority of parents (59%) stated the location of the school or ease of getting to the school had been among the most important factors in choosing a school. A quarter of parents mentioned academic success or success in exams (25%) and a similar proportion mentioned the overall reputation of the school or whether the school had been recommended to them (23%).
- Seven out of ten parents (71%) said they felt they had had a choice of good state-funded schools within their own local authority area; a quarter said this had not been the case, with 10% of parents saying there was only one good state-funded school within their local authority area.
- The majority of parents supported a range of school types in their local area:

- The vast majority of parents seemed to endorse the idea of state schools forming partnerships with Further Education colleges (89% said this was a good thing), parent groups (88%) and universities and Higher Education colleges (87%), with only one or two per cent of parents indicating that they thought such partnerships would be a bad thing. Approval of the idea of partnership with other state schools and community groups was also strong, with 82% and 80% of parents respectively saying these were a good thing and again small proportions indicating disapproval. Three quarters (76%) of parents said they thought partnership with charities was a good thing and two thirds (65%) said the same about partnership with businesses. Parents as a whole were less sure about partnerships with independent schools.
- 37% of parents were mainly favourable or very favourable towards academies.

Evaluation of Parent Support Advisors

The Parent Support Adviser Pilot (PSA) pilot is a government funded initiative to support 20 Local Authorities to introduce PSAs into their workforce. The DCSF commissioned the Centre for Educational Development, Appraisal and Research to evaluate the PSA pilot programme from September 2006- August 2008. A government grant (£40 million) has been made available to fund employment of PSAs over this period. This second Interim Report of the Parent Support Adviser Pilot reports the findings of interviews with 105 parents and 69 PSAs from the 12 case study LAs held between November 2007 and January 2008.

Key findings:
- Parents were generally very positive about the support from their PSAs: 9 out of 10 rated them very helpful;
- The types of support offered in the pilot were very varied, ranging from informal support, through individual and group support such as parenting classes, to intensive support for parents in substantial need;
- PSA characteristics that were associated with high parent satisfaction can be summed up as a balance between empathic professionalism and being seen as a ‘friend’;
- Overall, most PSAs spent more time on 1:1 work with parents and relatively less time with pupils, but the balance of work varied widely; and
- Indicative evidence of PSA effectiveness was provided by both parents and PSAs for engaging and empowering parents, improving parents’ relationships with their children and improving their children’s behavioural, emotional and social development.

Wellbeing and Community Empowerment

The Local Wellbeing Project is a three-year initiative to explore how local government can improve the happiness and wellbeing of their citizens. The project brings together three local authorities – Manchester, Hertfordshire and South Tyneside – with the Young Foundation; Professor Lord Richard Layard from the London School of Economics, who has led much of the debate about happiness and public policy; and the Improvement and Development Agency, who are leaders in local government innovation. The project is also backed by key central government departments.

The project covers five main strands: emotional resilience for 11 to 13 year olds; wellbeing of older people; guaranteed apprenticeships; neighbourhoods and community empowerment; and parenting. In each of these areas it will test out new approaches; measure their impact; develop replicable methods; and look at their cost effectiveness. Two underpinning themes will investigate the relationship between wellbeing and environmental sustainability and how best to measure wellbeing at a local level.

This report has been undertaken as part of the neighbourhood and community empowerment strand, which aims to accelerate understanding of how local authorities can, through their community engagement and neighbourhood working practices, increase the wellbeing of their residents.

Key points:
- A growing body of research supports the suggestion that community and neighbourhood empowerment has the potential to improve the wellbeing of residents and communities.
- Some forms of community empowerment involve power which is a ‘zero sum’ – where power is handed from one group to another, such as councillors devolving decisions on budgets to the community. However, empowerment does not always require this redistribution; often it requires that communities maximise their own capabilities by working together and involving themselves in civil society.
- Some of the less tangible outcomes of empowerment, such as increased contact between neighbours or improved knowledge of the local democratic process, have the potential to enhance wellbeing.
- empowerment that helps individuals and communities to exert control over the circumstances that affect their lives, thereby improving local wellbeing.
- Empowerment ‘done badly’ can lead to individuals and communities feeling that they cannot influence local circumstances and that they have very little control over some aspects of their lives. Poorly thought out empowerment initiatives can lead to disempowerment, which in turn reduces local wellbeing.

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).

CAMHS (Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services) Review

The Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service review commissioned by the DCSF and Department of Health have published their interim report:

Key points:
- There is evidence that the range of developments since 1995 in all services has achieved some notable improvements in all education, social care and health services, particularly the requirement on Local Authorities and Primary Care Trusts to produce a co-ordinated Child and Adolescent Mental Health Strategy.
- Comprehensive improvement in access to services for all children and consistency of provision across the full range of services has not yet been achieved.
- It has not been possible to monitor improvements in outcomes for children and young people as reliable routine outcome measurement and data collection is a complex task that is only just beginning to be undertaken by many services.

Safeguarding children report 2008

This report by Ofsted (on behalf of 8 inspectorates) examines arrangements for safeguarding children, is the 3rd such report and assesses arrangements for safeguarding children and young people in four key areas:

1. the effectiveness of the overall safeguarding systems and frameworks that are in place
2. the wider safeguarding role of public services
3. the targeted activity carried out to safeguard vulnerable groups of children. This includes updated evidence on the groups considered in the previous report, including asylum-seeking children, children in secure settings, looked after children and children treated by health services
4. the identification of and response to child protection concerns by relevant agencies.

Some key points:
- Local Safeguarding Children Boards have grown in independence but are still not fully developed.
- Strategic Partnerships are developed in all areas, but still need to improve joint commissioning and the management of high risk offenders.
- CRB checking is standardised, but good practice is not always followed.
- Inspections found evidence of a strong commitment by agencies to focus on the wider safeguarding needs of children and young people in addition to child protection.
- A shared, consistent understanding of safeguarding is still lacking, particularly between social care services and the criminal justice system.
- Some children and young people continue to express significant levels of concern about their personal safety and about being bullied, particularly in institutional and secure settings.
- There is better identification of needs at an early stage and increasingly effective provision of preventive and earlier intervention services.
- Many areas have identified domestic violence as a high priority area for action.
- Most areas are making good progress in developing the Common Assessment Framework.

The report goes onto make a series of recommendations, relevant at national and local level.

Danish model reduces youth crime in Scotland

In 2005 East Renfrewshire Council (ERC) made a commitment to implement an approach to preventing and addressing youth crime and anti social behaviour, based on Danish principles. The resulting project, School, Social Work, Police and Community (SSPC) is led by Social Work.

This report examines the funding, delivery of outcomes and output of the programme.

Some key points:
- An integrated response is the most effective and beneficial approach to dealing positively with vulnerable, damaged or difficult young people.
- Shared aims, practice, and ethos are at the core of what is making the approach operate successfully.
- It is a key strength of the Group, and exemplary practice that members do not say "this is not my remit". If something needs to be done they are in a position to do it then they do so.
- The approach fits with the relevant standards for the quality of the youth justice process and fits with the standards for the range and availability of programmes.
- We recommend, as a preventative measure, targeting resources on the transition from primary to secondary education, and in the first term of the first year at high school.

Youth Crime Action Plan

The UK Government have published their Youth Crime Action Plan, a joint plan between the Ministry for Justice, DCSF and Home Office. The plan which has a focus on early intervention and none-negotiable challenge and support.

Key points:

- Extension of family intervention projects.

- More use of ASBO's and Parenting Orders and sanctions for those parents who do not engage.

- More "community" work for offenders, overseen by new citizen's panels.

- More support for young offenders on release of custody.

- Local Authorities to take responsibility for education and training of young people in custody.

- Everyone over 16 found to be carrying a knife can expect prosecution.

- Increasing the provision of youth services at times when offending is likely.

- Making permanent exclusion from school an automatic trigger for Common Assessment Framework assessment of needs.

- Expanding Safer School Partnerships.

- Working closer with Local Authorities to improve family support which will help ensure problems are addressed early.

- Plus a series of longer term changes to legal processes for the most serious offenders.

See BBC news article

School funding in England

This report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies examined school funding by answering four questions:

• How have overall levels of public spending on education and schools in the UK evolved in recent years?
• How does the English school funding system allocate money to individual schools?
• How redistributive is the school funding system, and to what degree do funding variations reflect educational needs and parental background?
• What incentives do state schools face to attract new pupils and to improve school quality?

Key points:
- Education spending in the UK has seen increases averaging 4.3% a year in real terms over the past ten years. However, this rate of increase will slow to 3.4% a year over the years 2008–09 to 2010–11.
- Schools spending in England has enjoyed larger increases than education spending as a whole over the past ten years (averaging 6.0% per year in real terms), with particularly large increases in schools capital spending.
- School spending per pupil has increased by 6.4% a year in real terms under Labour to date, compared with increases averaging 4.7% in the private sector. State spending per pupil has risen from 50% of the private sector level in 1997–98 to 58% in 2006–07.
- While the provision of schools may be the responsibility of local authorities, the vast
majority of schools’ funding comes from the central government’s education budget.
- Changes to the system over recent years have gradually reduced the discretion local authorities have in distributing these funds. This is the result of increased ‘ring fencing’ (whereby local authorities are forced to spend grants on specific purposes) and increased use of direct payments and grants that must be passed on to schools in full.
- Other changes have also reduced the discretion local authorities have over school
funding in their area, including the Minimum Funding Guarantee, which guarantees minimum increases in funding per pupil for nearly all schools.
- However, powers over funding decisions have not simply been transferred up from local authorities to central government; schools themselves now have an increasing influence on funding decisions via Schools Forums.
- Funding is skewed towards schools with relatively large numbers of pupils from deprived backgrounds. On average, pupils who are eligible for free school meals attract over 70% more funding to their school than those who are not eligible. This holds true for both primary and secondary schools, and the funding ‘premium’ that follows FSM pupils has grown over time.
- Local authorities only allocate around 40–50% of the extra funding they receive for pupils who are eligible for free school meals towards the schools these pupils attend. In other words, local authorities seem to spread the funding targeted at low-income pupils more widely. If local authorities did not flatten extra income in this way, the additional money following a low-income pupil would be roughly 50% higher in secondary schools and more than doubled in primary schools.
- Under the current system, the amount of funding that schools receive does not respond quickly to changes in their numbers of pupils from deprived backgrounds or with additional educational needs.
- Most money ‘follows the pupil’ in the English school funding system, with the majority of funding directly determined by pupil numbers (weighted by age and background).
- The current system does not live up to the ‘school choice’ programme enthusiastically
described in the 2005 White Paper, in which successful schools expand, new entrants compete with existing providers, and weaker schools either improve their performance or else contract and close.
- Rigidities elsewhere in the school system blunt the incentives created by parental choice. Of the three criteria often used to determine whether genuine ‘school choice’ exists (pupil-led funding, supply flexibility and management freedom), the English system probably ‘fails’ on the last two.
- The supply side appears to be largely inflexible, with little threat of entry from new
providers. New school entry is decided by local authorities, which have little incentive to encourage new entry.
- School management is constrained by binding collective agreements covering many aspects of school operations, including pay and conditions. Where schools (such as Academies) have been given freedom from these agreements, they appear to have responded with innovation and experimentation. However, Academies supply only a tiny fraction of school places in England, and the success of these experiments is as yet unproven.

Read BBC news article

Children's Social Workforce

The CWDC have released a statistical analysis of the workforce of children's social workers in England. This includes children and family social work, residential care, foster care, education welfare, family court advisors, support workers and volunteers.

Key points:
- Although progress has been made in improving service delivery the latest annual OFSTED report states that there is still considerable room for improvement.
- The sector relies on a diverse range of organisations to deliver its services which increases the complexity of people management and means that there may be significant variation in organisational culture and working environments.
- The workforce is varied and this impacts on the ability to recruit and retain a suitably skilled workforce in some occupational groups; recruitment and retention issues also vary by occupation and region;
- The workforce has a higher than average proportion of part-time workers, and is predominantly female, although, at management level, the proportion of men is higher;
- During the last three years there have been major workforce development initiatives focused on the children’s social care workforce: the Options for Excellence review; the Children’s Workforce Strategy; Care Matters: Time for Change; the Children’s Plan; Building Brighter Futures: Next Steps for the Children’s Workforce; and related initiatives.

Children's Trusts - Statutory Guidance

The DCSF have released this paper as statutory guidance for Children's Trusts on inter-agency working. The first chapter sets the scene and context of Children's Trusts and recent changes to Children's Services in general. The Children's Trusts are "the totality of change needed to deliver better and more responsive integrated services." The document reads as though there is a need for an extra push on this as the current approach has only yielded limited results, and so a "step change" is needed.

Key points:
- So far, the change towards full multi-agency working is not embedded, although some areas are doing very well and making excellent progress.
- It sets high expectations for Children’s Trusts to deliver measurable improvements for all children and young people and, in support of this, to have in place by 2010 consistent, high quality arrangements to provide identification and early intervention for all children and young people who need additional help. It emphasises the crucial role of local authorities in driving change.
- The step change expected of Children’s Trusts must include a step change in the involvement of schools in Children’s Trust arrangements. All schools, including Academies, should contribute to and in turn be strongly supported by local Trust arrangements which ensure shared ownership of all outcomes of all children in an area.
- Strong school level indicators are being developed to help schools, local partners and Children’s Trust boards measure each school’s contribution to the well-being of local children and how, working together, this can be improved.
- Local authorities must take swift and decisive action to prevent schools from failing and reverse failure quickly when it happens. We also expect local authorities to challenge schools who are not sufficiently improving their pupils’ performance including those who are coasting.
- To deliver the results necessary for a world class system requires a step change in progress, including consistent, high quality arrangements for identification of additional needs and early intervention.

Assessment for Learning Strategy

The DCSF have released the Assessment for Learning Strategy, which follows on from the "Making Good Progress" pilot. It is intended to "support schools in using assessment information to improve and plan provision, as well as improving the quality of the assessment process itself."

“Assessment for learning is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there”.
- Assessment Reform Group, 2002

Key points:
- The aims of the strategy are that every child knows how they are doing what they need to improve and how to get there; every teacher is equipped to make well informed judgements about pupils attainment, understands the concept of progression and knows how to use their judgement to plan; every school has structured and systematic assessment systems; every parent and carer knows how well their child is doing.
- It highlights three aspects of assessment: day-to-day; periodic and transitional.
- £150m over three years to support schools in delivering the strategy, through the standards fund.
- Yearly targets, for the following three years.
- A timeline of roll out, with training for schools between autumn 2008 and spring 2009, which is the responsibility of the local authority.

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.

Children in need

This study commissioned by the DCSF explored whether data on the delivery and use of services for children in need is available, is recorded, can be accessed and could feasibly be systematically collected for the children in need census. It examined the likely quality and completeness of such data, the practical difficulties of extracting it from various management information systems (MIS) and the constraints of consent, confidentiality and data protection.

The Children in Need (CIN) Census aims to collect data on all children receiving support from Children’s Social Care Services, including children looked after, those supported in their families or independently and children subject to a Child Protection Plan. The Census provides evidence on which the DCSF can develop policy, make Spending Review bids, allocate resources to Local Authorities, understand the growth in spending on children’s services and measure their output in the National Accounts.

The CIN Census was suspended after 2005 but is being reintroduced in 2008-09. The present research was commissioned to discover whether the scope of the Census could be extended after 2009 to include some of the numerous additional services used by Children in Need, including those provided by or in partnership with education, youth justice, Connexions, health services and the voluntary sector.

Key points:
- This study identified and drew up working definitions for 11 additional services accessed by children in need, five of which are recommended to be included in the CIN census as a priority: Children with Disabilities; Family Support; Early Years; Special educational Need and Youth Justice.
- The principal problem is not the definitions of the services, but the myriad different ways in which the services may be named, commissioned, paid for and delivered, even within the same authority, and hence the lack of uniform recording and storage of data.
- Issues of consent and confidentiality will significantly impede most data collection from outside Children’s Social Care, but especially from health-related services such as CAMHS.
- It will not be easy to collect uniform child-level census data on most additional services and it may be necessary to consider alternative ways of collecting data to explain expenditure on these services.
- It is possible to determine that a service was provided, but very difficult to obtain an accurate measure of the volume of service provided and the cost incurred.
- The census definition of ‘Children in Need’ may need to be revised, in line with the Children Act 1989, to include the increasing number of vulnerable children accessing additional services from local authorities without a formal referral to Children’s Social Care, sometimes as a result of assessment under the Common Assessment Framework. An even wider population of children access preventive services partly or wholly funded by Children’s Social Care. The question is: should these services and these children be included in the CIN Census?
- Changes to the CIN Census after 2008-09 should be phased in gradually, giving time for consultation and for small-scale pilots to test the new provisions. Experience of implementing electronic data collections suggests that those which require changes to MIS require at least two years to implement.