Children's Centres - reaching the hardest

Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and Capacity have created a paper which identifies methods employed by Children's Centres which are successful in engaging parents:
- Good consultation with the community and hence secured trust.
- Effective monitoring and evaluation.
- Providing a personalised approach and appropriate support at different levels of progression.
- The leaders have expertise and knowledge and full understanding of poverty and disadvantage.
- Developed links with Job Centre Plus, employers and training providers to enable parents to progress to employment.

"Revolutionary shift in workforce culture"

The words of Ofsted in their report on workforce modernisation which found that the requirements of the Children's Act and National Agreements were being met and that teachers are now spending more time on teaching and learning. However, the impact of the reforms has not being effectively evaluated at the school level and slower progress is being made in allowing strategic leadership and headship time largely because of confusion about what "dedicated headship time" meant.

Birth penalty

The Centre for the Economics of Education has complied a report on the effects on being a summer baby. Those born in the summer tend to do worse throughout their academic career and although the effect declines as the child grows there is still an impact at age 16 & 18. This is true for several subgroups sampled, although those on free school meals tend to do worse still. Starting school earlier has a modest difference and so the authors suggest changing the assessment regime and instruments to recognise the difference, something which by coincidence is likely to occur under the personalised learning agenda.

Engaging BME parents

The DCFS commissioned a research project to explore how children's services can effectively engage BME parents. The results are largely unsurprising: BME parents are likely to be disproportionally affected by barriers to access; staff made assumptions on BME parents; parents are keen to be involved but often it fails to happen; engagement with fathers tends to be especially difficult and that the BME label itself is not helpful as it encourages a view of a single group. The conclusions points to a mixed picture, if we are to create holistic children's services, we need to be clearer about what and how to effectively engage all parents.

Diplomas, diplomas...

In October the DCFS announced that they would delay the review of A-levels (planned for 2008) until 2013 so that they could allow time for diplomas to become the "qualification of choice" amongst older children. A Diploma Development Partnership is to start to specify the content for the 17 new diplomas early in 2008. Subscribe for 14-19 updates.

Ethnic Minority Achievement Programme Newsletter

National Strategies Ethnicity, Social Class and Achievement programmes released their first termly newsletter in October. The content has a focus on recent activities by the National Strategies team, updates of resources and many case study examples.