Report launch: What Works in education for children who have had social workers?
Despite increased efforts in recent years, we still know relatively little about outcomes for particularly vulnerable groups of young people, and the effects of interventions to raise attainment and outcomes of these groups.
It is in this context that What Works for Children’s Social Care, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation, undertook further investigation to identify educational interventions that are most beneficial for children with social care experience.
In an event hosted by Nesta, Michael Sanders, Executive Director of What Works for Children’s Social Care, enthusiastically introduced the report, which re-analysed data from 63 randomised controlled trials on the impacts of educational interventions on the attainment of young people who have had a social worker.
The report identified 10 projects that show ‘signs of potential’ in improving educational outcomes for children in care. These included:
Affordable maths tuition
Embedding formative assessment
Family skills
Vocabulary enrichment intervention
Sanders emphasised the need to build a more robust evidence base to help social workers, carers, schools and Virtual School Heads (VSHs) make best decisions for young people’s education, adding that we now need larger projects to check if the findings from the 63 RCTs can be confirmed.
Jane Pickthall, Head of The Virtual School at North Tyneside Council and previously Vice Chair of the National Association of Virtual School Heads, highlighted that the needs of children in care vary to those on Free School Meals, with emotional needs and developmental trauma playing significant roles.
Pickthall said she was glad to see a new evidence base emerge, one which provides a starting point for VSHs to refer to when deciding how to provide targeted support for Looked After Children, adding that VSHs would welcome further evidence.
Pickthall said: “Tutoring is the method that we know works, but we know children in care need longer stints of tuition as it takes more time to trust the tutor”.
She described Virtual School Heads as “Bridging the gap between health, social care and education” and the job now is to steer members towards the evidence base and focus on collaboration.
Stephen Fraser of the Education Endowment Fund spoke on what else we can do to build upon existing best practice.
The audience then heard from a representative of Save the Children who highlighted the positive outcomes of a programme called FAST (Families and Schools Together) which is designed for families dealing with drug or alcohol issues.
One member of the audience challenged the research for focusing too narrowly on education and not looking at development of sound processing and motor skills.
Other points included:
The need to look closer at a 10% gap between reading and writing
We are failing our teenage population; more secondary research needed, KS2 doing better,
Need a national effort to make every Virtual School Head looks at RCTs
Primary school headteacher said we need more qualitative data on Children in Care and their relationships
You can read the full report here.