UPDATE NO 352 17 May 2019

AD Education Network – next meeting Friday 7 June

The next meeting of the AD Education network will be on Friday 7 June, and it’s shaping up to be a great session. Please can you contact Alison Rendle (details below) to confirm who will be attending (substitutes welcome).

The meeting will focus on how local areas are delivering school improvement in the changed landscape of LA responsibilities. Simon Day from ISOS Partnership will share his knowledge about the different models and approaches which are being developed across the region and nationally.  This presentation will be followed by updates from delegates and a general discussion. 

We will also be joined by Stewart Jackson HMI, who will return to give feedback and share learning from the post-16 focus in this year’s round of annual conversations.

The AD Education Network is now part-way through an interesting and varied programme of meetings and activity for 2019.  In April, the group met for a lively and informative full day network with SEND colleagues.  The agenda included sharing of practice from across the region; a focus on managing HNB budgets and exploring approaches to post-16 SEND.  There was a great buzz in the room as colleagues shared experiences and everyone went away with new ideas to take consider and new contacts made. 

Colleagues have developed an interesting and wide-ranging forward plan for the year. In the autumn the group will consider approaches to teacher recruitment and retention. The network also now has two task and finish groups.  The first, led by Portsmouth, is looking at issues around attendance, children missing education and elective home education.  They will report back to the network in the autumn.  The other group, which is in the process of setting itself up, will be working on educational data across the region.

Please can you visit the AD Education Network page and check that we have the right contact for your authority. If you discover that our information has gone out of date, please contact either Isabelle Gregory or Alison Rendle (details below).

Complex LAC Project

There will be a project meeting for the Complex LAC Project on Wednesday 17 July 2019 – venue somewhere in London. Because all 19 authorities in the South East are now involved (see below) we will need to restrict attendance to 2 people per authority. Please contact Rosemary Perry – details below – to arrange your places.

Progress on the Project

The most exciting news is that, following our very positive meeting with the DCS group in March, all of the 7 remaining authorities in the south east have joined us. So welcome to Bracknell Forest,Buckinghamshire, Medway, Reading, Slough, Surrey and Windsor & Maidenhead.  This group of authorities are now completing the data collection exercise so by the time we all meet again in July, we will have analysed data from over 1200 cases………

The completed DfE grant application was submitted by the deadline and a copy is available via the DCS restricted page of this website

We met with the outgoing and incoming Chief Executives of ICHA recently and they are very interested to work in partnership with us on the project; this was reflected in the DfE bid which was submitted this week.  We have also made contact with other organisations, including TACT, to gauge their interest in being involved.

We have started some work with East Sussex, Milton Keynes, Oxfordshire and Southampton to identify ways of recording the views of looked after children themselves, using existing groupings and children in care councils.  We also want to use this workstream to identify how young people themselves can be involved in our project.  If any other authority would like to be involved in this and/or has experience of incorporating the views of looked after children into the delivery of similar projects or the actual governance of such projects, please do let Mark Evans (details below) know.

Peer Challenge Triads – Planning for 2019-20

We now have a full set of dates for  Peer Challenge Triad sessions in November 2019; the move to late autumn is to avoid clashing with Ofsted Annual Conversations which will run from January 2020.

We have commissioned ADCS to undertake an independent review of the recent round of Triad Peer Challenges, and their report will feed into the detailed planning for 2019-20.

17 out of 19 2019 self-assessments have now been uploaded onto DCS-only area of website. For access to this page please consult your DCS or Isabelle Gregory (details below).

Triad 1 – East Sussex, Surrey and Wokingham on Monday 25 November 2019

Triad 2 – Kent, West Sussex and Portsmouth on Friday 1 November 2019

Triad 3 – Hampshire, IoW, Milton Keynes and Slough on Monday 11 November 2019

Triad 4 – Medway, Oxfordshire and Windsor and Maidenhead on Friday 29 November 2019

Triad 5 – Brighton and Hove, Buckinghamshire and West Berkshire on Friday 15 November 2019

Triad 6 – Southampton, Bracknell Forest and Reading on Wednesday 13 November 2019

Please contact Isabelle Gregory (details below) for further information on these events

Children not in school – DfE Consultation

The DfE has launched a 12-week consultation on “Children not in school”.

The earlier consultation report is here, and the revised Elective Home Education guidance for local authorities is here. 

The current consultation document seeks views on a number of proposals for legislation and the way in which those proposals would be implemented:

• a duty on local authorities to maintain a register of children of compulsory school age who are not registered at schools of a specified type;
• a duty on parents to provide information to their home local authority if their children are within the scope of such a register;
• a duty on education settings attended by the children on the register to respond to enquiries from local authorities about the education provided to individual children. The settings in scope would not include those providing supplementary education outside school hours;
• a duty on local authorities to provide support to home educating families – if it is requested by such families.