Reflections On: Going beyond the headline data to serve the underserved

Paul Kinder, Senior Deputy Head at Warlingham School & Sixth Form College, reflects on their educational equity work through SAfE’s Marc Rowland programme.

Having had the privilege of working with Marc Rowland for almost four years now, the mantra ‘The language gap is the disadvantaged gap’ is now one which is firmly established at Warlingham School & Sixth Form College.

For our staff, school culture has developed around the core understanding that, as Marc champions, “There is no such thing in education as a golden ticket but developing students’ language is a close as you are going to come”. The focus of the last three years has thus rightly been about teachers prioritising the eradication of the language gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students.

It has, put simply, meant staff at the school adopting as one a clearly defined approach in the classroom to ensure that we all proactively develop oracy and writing skills and to then build on language ownership and application. Tier 2 and 3 language, pre-taught, rehearsed, used in writing and oracy. The language of the classroom becoming the owned, applied and understood language of the students.,

At the core of this originally was identifying and supporting the development of each teacher’s capacity, skill and ability to deliver this intent. In terms of Socio-economically disadvantaged students, it was clear that building staff competence and confidence in this area would support all students but benefit the disadvantaged most.

Student interventions remained – paired reading, appraisal targets focussed on the development of language, mentoring, tutoring and targeted support delivered by literacy trained practioners amongst a range of interventions. We remained wary of initiative fatigue however, both for staff and for students and kept the core message of closing the language gap as the core foci of classroom practice.

The impact was clear as the dial started to shift on the progress and attainment of our underserved cohort.

Shifting sands…..

Post covid, another clear priority was emerging alongside our core focus, namely student attendance. The connection between school attendance and educational outcomes has always been clear but with our persistent absence rate spiking, our data showed that our identified underserved cohort, particularly those who were socio-economically disadvantaged and those with SEND were disproportionately represented in these absence figures. We also knew that arguably, attendance trumped everything.

Like many schools, our initial response was to “try harder with the systems that worked”. But the post covid landscape was a different beast and where parental engagement strategies and responsive interventions had worked to a point previously, the impact now was clearly stunted.

It was also apparent that like many schools, there was an increasing trend of attendance to school but not to lessons, with a core but growing group of recidivists opting out of learning. Opting out of extra-curricular and personal development opportunities. Opting out of leadership opportunities. In short, Opting out of their school – our school.

Whilst we had assumed that good attendance would result in success at school, it became clear as we drilled down beyond the headlines and spoke with a range of stakeholders that the reverse was indeed true – it was success at school that would lead to good attendance. It was ensuring that students genuinely felt like they belonged and were supported that would draw our young people back. The mind set had to shift amongst the adults first.

Going beyond the data to build belonging

So, what could we do? Fighting the groundswell of views that if we can’t get students into school, it was out of our sphere of influence was the first port of call. We couldn’t control the out of school context, but we had full ownership of what students encountered in our corridors and classrooms.

The improvement plan narrowed to centre around the key theme of building belonging. A universal offer that centres around building strong relationships with all children – by modelling approaches to how we are with one another, how we interact, how we build relationships. All staff. All students. “It’s just what we do here” is the response now.

There is no deviation from respecting one another and being polite to one another. That’s the holistic expectation. It builds a culture of belonging and forges a school community. But learning behaviours also needed to be explicitly taught, not merely hoped for in the belief that they would develop by osmosis or occur by happenchance.

For the underserved however, equity not equality was required. Huge amounts of work have been undertaken on building teams around children to avoid a range of initiatives being thrown at them and their parents and families from a range of sources. A joined-up understanding by key stakeholders of the whole families lives in their specific contexts was essential, as was an understanding of the barriers they faced and the provision of a joined-up package of responses. Support not just sanction when failure reared its head – if it’s not safe to fail at school then where?

It meant ensuring that before transition we knew our incoming students and their families, their needs and the challenges they faced. It meant targeting for mentoring or bespoke support our current young people whose triangulated data of progress, behaviour, attendance, reading ages and extra-curricular participation revealed that intervention was required to break the cycle. Build on the universal offer and supplement, not supplant it.

We have swelled our behaviour, mental health support and pastoral teams to ensure more bespoke, targeted and proactive support for students. Poor behaviour is a symptom, just like under-attainment or low attendance. Dealing with the symptom does not beget the cure.

In short, knowing our students but also ensuring that they feel seen, heard, understood and safe is the pivotal requirement. Marc Rowland has been clear on this. A second golden ticket.