The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted the extent to which schools have been plugging gaps in support for vulnerable children, which have been exacerbated by austerity. As schools re-open, there are likely to be even greater numbers of children who need social and emotional provision alongside learning. If we are to meet these needs, now is the time to think creatively about how we can place schools at the heart of a wider community network protecting the safety, welfare, health and wellbeing of pupils.
Since the Covid-19 outbreak took hold in the UK, we have seen a dramatic decrease in the number of referrals to children’s services, which are made where a concern is raised for the safety or wellbeing of a child. In the first few weeks of the crisis alone, from early to mid-March, there was a 50% drop in referrals to children’s social care, although there are very good reasons to believe that the level of need among children is growing dramatically through the crisis.
The lockdown will lead to rising child poverty as parents and carers face unemployment. Some families in small, overcrowded homes without outdoor space are more likely to have experienced conflicts. Calls to the national domestic violence helpline rose by a half in the first three weeks of lockdown. Hidden behind closed doors, some children will have experienced physical, emotional or sexual abuse. The mental health of the whole nation is being tested as we cope with social isolation. As children go online in search of company, they are exposed to risks of cyberbullying and online grooming and many are also anxious about the impact of school closures on their education, particularly children who were due to sit exams this year and move on to their next stage of education. Little wonder that Childline has seen an increase the number of calls from children in need of help.
Why then are children’s services referrals declining through this period? One explanation is lack of contact with teachers who have a legal duty to refer pupils about whom they are concerned and account for around a fifth of children’s services referrals. Other major sources of referrals include GPs surgeries, hospitals, social workers and police. Since lockdown most children are not coming into regular contact with these professionals who would usually notice early signs of neglect or trauma and make a referral. During school closures, the children of key workers and those considered vulnerable have still had a right to attend school. However, uptake of these places has been low — with no more than 15% of these pupils attending — which means school staff are missing vital opportunities to notice changes in their pupils that might be red flags for issues at home. Through its research, the RSA has heard from schools that have found it difficult to arrange for social workers, who are largely working remotely, to visit homes and check in on pupils.
The attendance of vulnerable pupils is not guaranteed to improve as schools re-open. National polling commissioned by the RSA to understand public feelings about the return to school shows that over 40% of parents of children under 15 do not think schools should re-open in June at all. And it is some of the most educationally disadvantaged groups that are least likely to support sending their children back to school: the RSA’s survey showed that half of all black respondents think schools should not open in June compared with a third of white respondents.
Stepping into the breach
Through its Bridges to the Future series of essays, events and podcasts, the RSA has been thinking about the relationship between crisis responses and long-term change, exploring innovations and how these might continue as we emerge from the pandemic. The response of many schools provide just some examples of responses that could be retained and built on as we move forward. Throughout the lockdown, we have heard stories of school staff visiting homes to check on the families they are most concerned about or making regular phone calls to parents and carers. A survey of 164 RSA Fellows working in education — and representing at least 113 schools — revealed that 77% are making more calls home than under normal circumstances. While this is a relatively small sample, the reasons most commonly given — concerns about learning loss and the wellbeing for the most vulnerable pupils — is likely to be echoed across the system. Schools have stepped into the breach.
As the RSA’s recent research on preventing school exclusions showed, close partnership working between families and schools can improve attendance, behaviour and educational outcomes for pupils. We must find ways to build the capacity within schools that allows them to consistently work more closely with families while not overloading teachers. This means it will be necessary either to protect staff time or re-introduce family workers; a role prevalent in schools through the early 2000s, but much more infrequently found since funding cuts to the programme that introduced them (as explored in the RSA’s Schools Without Walls report).
There are other factors that suggest a need for more fundamental changes. It will not be possible for schools to manage the wellbeing and safeguarding needs arising from the crisis and simultaneously tackle the huge challenge of learning catch-up. For years, schools have had to take on more and more responsibility for the wider wellbeing, safety, welfare and health of pupils as austerity heralded significant cuts to public service budgets, limiting the capacity of child and adolescent mental health services, youth work and other agencies to provide help.
This situation was unsustainable before Covid-19 hit. Now, with demand for additional support likely to rise, we need a fundamental shift towards schools being an anchor for, but not the provider of, a comprehensive range of state and community support for children. In doing so, we can take hope from the initiatives that already do just this. For example, the RSA has previously written about Reach Academy Feltham where a children’s hub is run alongside the school that provides antenatal support, home learning support for parents, adult education programmes and much more to meet the wider needs of the families whose children do or will one day attend the school. Another example is Leeds City Council’s ‘inclusion partnerships’, where council funding is devolved to collaboratives of schools and other professions to meet children’s needs. We can also look back and learn from a previous large-scale approach to provide wraparound support for children: Every Child Matters.
Every Child Matters
In the wake of the murder of Victoria Climbié in 2001 and wider concerns about safeguarding, the Every Child Matters approach was implemented by the New Labour government from 2003. It continued until David Cameron’s coalition government took power in 2010. The policy aimed to ensure that all children and young people from birth until the age of 19 were able to be healthy, safe, to enjoy and achieve in life and make a positive contribution to society and achieve economic wellbeing. Philosophically, the shift was from intervening in children’s lives at the point of crisis to intervening early enough to avert crisis.
Practically, this meant improved information sharing between the various agencies and services working with teams, a common framework for assessing children’s needs and the creation of multi-disciplinary teams. These included professionals who work solely with children — such as teachers, children’s social workers and child psychologists — and also those who sometimes work with children, such as GPs and the police. The vision was that these professionals would work together in locations that children and their families regularly visit (for example, children’s centres, schools or health centres) to assess and respond to children’s needs. In order to implement the policy, Directors of Children’s Services in every local authority were to work with a councillor (appointed as the lead member for children) to develop a strategy for local professionals across services to work together.
The focus on prevention rather than responding when issues have already occurred in children’s lives was widely welcomed; as was the idea of professionals working closer together to meet the needs of children and the commitment of funding to support them in doing so. The aim was that children and families would no longer have to submit to different assessments from different professionals each time an issue presented.
The policy had many successes. Around 90% of schools surveyed in the years following the introduction of Every Child Matters reported accessing support from health, social care and the police, and year-on-year surveys demonstrated that schools found services to be increasingly accessible as the approach became more established. Schools’ satisfaction levels with the public services they were collaborating with increased over time, and an improvement in information sharing between public services was also reported. This kind of information sharing is obviously invaluable to prevent children and families having to explain their circumstances repeatedly in different assessments with different services. And it seemed to get results. Local authorities like Leeds City Council reported that partnership working between schools, families and public services under the approach led to tangible outcomes including the best GCSE results on record, more young people staying in school post-16 and reduced wait times for mental health support. Nationally, both relative and absolute child poverty fell.
However, the policy presented challenges. Firstly, the assessment and outcomes framework tended to focus on symptoms while ignoring cause. Identifying a child’s obesity and responding with an exercise plan is a short-term fix but does not resolve what is often the underlying systemic cause — poverty — which requires a national structural policy response rather than a council-by-council approach.
Secondly, although the policy intended to bring about a fundamental shift in the way services support children, each participating professional still needed to meet the short-term goals of their service or institution: social workers still needed to close cases and teachers still needed to contribute to their school’s exam and Ofsted scores. The time and space was not always created to resolve the tensions between working collaboratively with colleagues to improve children’s lives and meeting the demands that your profession places on you.
Thirdly, some groups of professionals were under-represented in the multi-disciplinary teams such as those from health, housing or the voluntary sector. Anecdotally, those working to the new policy found that it was imposed from the top down, rather than being something that they actively co-created with colleagues across other services.
When Michael Gove arrived at Sanctuary House, the Department for Children, Schools and Families sign was replaced with the Department for Education, mention of Every Child Matters was purportedly banned in its corridors. The focus was now squarely on academic outcomes. These are clearly essential for children’s success in life, but there has not been a significant impetus for change. During the Covid-19 crisis, rising public awareness of the plight of the most vulnerable children coupled with parents trying to support their children with lockdown loneliness and anxiety has underlined the need to also focus on children’s social and emotional needs. An RSA-commissioned poll shows that over half of UK adults believe that more time should be spent in schools on “supporting well-being, mental health and resilience”.
Towards new collaboratives for children
The social, emotional and physical needs of children need to be met if they are to thrive in school and beyond. School staff cannot do this work alone. This is why the RSA recently recommended that government invest in collaborative communities of professionals from different disciplines who have the time and resource available to work together to meet every child’s needs.
Since the RSA made that recommendation in our Pinball Kids report, we have been approached by local leaders across the country interested in the question we had posed about how to develop the connective tissue between schools and the wider support network around them including public services, voluntary and community organisations. They, like us, believe that together — united by a common purpose — we can rewrite the story of the children who are pinged from pillar to post in search of support and regrettably sometimes end up falling out of the education system altogether.
Our recent conversations with local leaders have revealed deep passion for working collaboratively with colleagues across services to improve the outcomes of the most vulnerable children. Yet, across all places, there are barriers to this and key questions have been raised. How can we align objectives between various institutions with different accountability demands? How can we develop a culture of collaborative working and associated working practices? How can we ensure there is representation from all schools and services?
In answering these questions, we will be working with leaders in a number of localities, applying the RSA’s design expertise to create a child-centred system. The aim is to support the development of operational networks — collaboratives — that support school leaders to prevent exclusions. The aim will be to develop and deliver a shared vision and collective responsibility for children across schools, youth work, social work, health, criminal justice and the voluntary sector in each locality, resulting in improved outcomes for vulnerable children.
Arguably, Every Child Matters was overly focused on professionals and did not tap into wider public support for efforts to do the best for local children. A completely different approach has been taken with local initiatives like Child Friendly Leeds, which seeks to rally the entire city’s population behind the aim of making the city a better place to grow up. As the RSA embarks on a new programme of work, we will look to approaches like this as our inspiration. We are committing to a deep process of co-creation that directly confronts the tensions that have thwarted previous multi-disciplinary efforts to meet the needs of our most vulnerable children. This will include actively engaging young people and families in designing an approach they can feel proud to be a part of. We will create an environment that enables critical thinking about roles and capacity to act within the wider system. And we will create a safe space for the difficult conversations that must happen for collaboration to be successful.
The RSA will work closely with partners in each locality to identify the key actors that work with children at risk of exclusion and understand how they currently inter-relate. Through interviews and engagement with representative stakeholders, we will identify and map the assets they have available around them, and support them to better understand how they might be used to address local challenges. We will run workshops with the stakeholders identified in each locality to co-create and commit to a shared vision for supporting all local children at risk of exclusion. And we will support them to co-design an approach to joint working, which might include regular meetings with a representative cohort of stakeholders at which cases of children at risk of exclusion are reviewed and action to be taken is agreed. This will then be piloted over the coming months, and the model will be refined with support from the RSA.
We hope that with support from funding partners and forward-thinking local authorities, we are able to make a pot of money available to each collaborative to invest in interventions for the pupils identified as at risk. Throughout the process, the RSA will be a learning partner, linking the collaboratives with training opportunities and with speakers to inspire their work. And we will be supporting the evaluation of the partners so that we can help them to continuously refine the model, share findings in order to inform efforts in other places, and to advocate for central government investment in the most effective collaborative approaches for supporting vulnerable children.
Taking the co-creation approach means that it is far to early to know what the final shape of collaboratives will be. However, early discussions suggest that factors that will need to be explored such as how to encourage all local schools to participate fully, and how to collaboratively set goals that overcome institutional pressures such as deadlines to close social work cases or performance in Ofsted inspections.
As the programme develops it is likely to highlight the need to look at the current mix of skills needed and the role of the voluntary and community sector. To this end, we hope to be working with both the Children’s Society which runs services for children at risk of criminal exploitation, missing from home or care, and who are desperately in need of mental health support, and the Staff College, which provides continuing professional development to children’s services professionals.
The time is now
When all children return to school, likely in September, school staff will have a lot of work to do to catch children up academically, but there will also be a lot of work to do to respond to children’s social and emotional needs. We cannot look to schools alone to meet the challenge. We need joined-up, collaborative, place-based action. Professionals, families and young people must feel ownership of the model and a pride in how they work together to create better futures for all local children. The RSA hopes that central government will be supportive of our efforts and we will look to work with colleagues from the Department for Education and others to ensure that national policy can be informed by the findings of these local experiments.
Establishing supportive networks around schools as they open again could ensure that underlying needs are identified and responded to before they manifest in behaviours that lead to educational exclusion. Underpinning the RSA’s work is the belief that what is good for these children is good for every child; our aim is to create a framework for vulnerable children that will make the whole system more attentive to the wellbeing of all of our children.
