Introduction 

In 2011, the government introduced funding to support the educational attainment of disadvantaged pupils, which would be defined by those on free school meals due to low parental income or reliance on benefits. 

An additional sum of money was introduced to support children in care, those adopted or previously in care, through Pupil Premium Plus. A grant of £2,300 per looked after child is received by the Virtual School for the Virtual School Head to support the education-related outcomes of children and young people in this cohort from reception to Year 11. 

With an estimated £132 million to allocate to support more than 60,000 children in care, the 150 Virtual School Heads across the country need to know how they can most effectively spend this money.

Aiming to better understand the impact of Pupil Premium Plus and shine a light on best practice across England, the National Association of Virtual School Heads (NAVSH) commissioned Bath Spa University to conduct a new piece of research. The findings, summarised below, were informed by 61 of the 150 Virtual School Heads across the country.

Pupil Premium Plus is spent on interventions including: 

1. Specialist support services, including speech and language therapy, educational psychology and counselling and mental health services. 

2. Training for stakeholders, particularly around emotional needs. 

3. Additional staffing; including school staff to support looked after children. 

4. Virtual School staffing and resources, including electronic support devices.

5. Bespoke interventions, including creating a bespoke curriculum and one-to-one tuition.

6. Equipment, including resources for looked after children such as computer hardware. 

7. Regional events, such as Designated Teacher conferences. 

8. Social support, including school or social clubs, celebration days and foster care support, events to develop cultural awareness or employability for children in care. 

Evidencing tutoring for Looked After Children

A key recommendation of the report is that further research is undertaken to identify evidence-based interventions to improve education-related outcomes for children in care.

At Equal Education, we are working with ImpactEd to measure and better understand the impact our tutors have on the lives of our young people and demonstrate how they improve outcomes. 

We are also working with Virtual Schools across the West Midlands to run a literacy tutoring intervention to measure the effectiveness of tuition delivered by trained teachers in school. 

We hope our findings will add to the evidence base on what works and acknowledge the importance of many of the key findings in this report, including effective multi-agency collaboration and communication, and the use of ePEPs.

It is important for all those working in this field working to improve outcomes for looked after children and those with a social worker to take heed of these recommendations in this report: 

Recommendation 1

• Conduct further research to identify evidenced-based interventions that improve education-related outcomes for looked after children. 

Recommendation 2

• Provide information, advice and formal training on Pupil Premium Plus that is accessible to, and meets the particular needs of, all professionals who play a key role in supporting the educational outcomes of looked after children. 

Recommendation 3

• Extend the resources available on the NAVSH website to develop a repository for: Policy, academic and practitioner publications that focus on supporting the education of looked after children, including the effective use of PP+; and Evidenced-based interventions and resources that can be funded by PP+. 

Recommendation 4

• Extend PP+ funding to support the educational outcomes for looked after children beyond the age of 16 years.

Recommendation 5

• Increase opportunities for networking within and between professional stakeholder groups, to share good practice. 

Recommendation 6

• Benchmark conventional measures (e.g. attainment, progress and attendance) and other measures of education-related success (e.g. social and emotional wellbeing, attitude) at the point of entering the care system, using a more bespoke ‘first PEP’. 

Other key findings:

• The effective allocation of PP+ centres on:

1. An informed PEP which is tailored to the needs of the looked after child.

2. Multi-agency team collaboration to inform and support educational outcomes. 

• 67% Virtual School Heads usually allocated more than 50% of their budget, but not 100%. 

• 85% of Virtual School Heads said the most important factor when allocating Pupil Premium Plus should be “evidence of effectiveness of PP+ funded interventions”, but 44% actually do. 

• A significant majority of all professionals working with looked after children expressed the opinion that the views of looked after children should be one of the most important factors taken into account when informing how PP+ is allocated.

• The importance of the voice of the looked after children remains paramount in the research process.

• High levels of staff turnover and high levels of mobility amongst looked after children can both impact negatively on continuity and collaboration.

• The report notes that evidencing the effectiveness of interventions is challenging due to the vast number of social and personal variables involved in supporting the often complex needs of this group.  

Conclusion

The findings of this report are important for any organisation working to improve outcomes of those in care. We look forward to working with other organisations on sharing best practice and hope to play an active role in putting these recommendations into practice. This will be challenging in the virtual world many of us now find ourselves operating, without the chance to exchange ideas at events such as the NAVSH conference. We welcome opportunities to promote dialogue and understanding on what works in materially improving outcomes for those we serve.