Behaviour Support Plan: Good Practice

Pupil Retention Grant at Ercall Wood

The spending of the PRG at Ercall Wood has been designed to do exactly as the name suggests: to set up courses and provide the back-up necessary to try to retain pupils in school. As such, the PRG can be seen as part of the wider “social inclusion” debate, whereby investment in pupils at an early stage may serve to keep them in school.

Approximate spending at Ercall Wood for 2000 – 2001 was as follows:

Rationale

The vocational course at TCAT gives our KS4 pupils the opportunity to follow courses such as motor vehicle maintenance, which the school does not have the facilities to provide. The TCAT course, in conjunction with work placements for a morning or afternoon per week, can make a big difference to staying on rates for pupils who struggle with the demands of the National Curriculum. It gives some pupils a welcome break from the demands of exam based GCSEs.

On the timetable, the TCAT course takes the time of two “options”. Thus the pupils are not missing the core curriculum of English, Maths, Science, D&T or a Modern Foreign Language. To run the course, the school is not invoking the “Disapplication at KS4” rule.  Pupils are simply following a vocational course in place of options such as History or Geography.

Our school counsellor is employed 3 days per week, of which 2 days are paid from the PRG.  The school’s counselling policy simply states that counselling is used where pupils “arrive at school in no fit state to learn”. The counsellor is always fully booked on all three days. It is hard to assess the effectiveness of counselling; the counsellor is dealing with difficult or volatile youngsters who often have behavioural problems.  The issue is how much worse they might have been without counselling! Evidence from pastoral heads and form tutors has convinced us that counselling is an invaluable addition to our range of strategies within the school.

The Behaviour Support Team have done much valuable work in school, not just with pupils, but also with staff. They have suggested a number of techniques to help keep pupils focussed on their learning.  Pupils speak of “finding the sessions useful” when talking about their work with BST members.

The spending on extra EWO time and on secretarial administrative time was designed  with the specific target in mind of reducing unauthorised attendance rates. Each morning the secretary telephones the homes of absent pupils who are likely to be playing truant. Pastoral heads liaise with her to save her making unnecessary calls to pupils for whom we have no concerns.  Persistent offenders receive home visits from the EWO. Pupils know that their parents will receive a phone call each day they decide to stay away from school. This has had a noticeable positive effect on attendance rates.

Next year the PRG spending at Ercall Wood will be much the same except that we intend to run our own “in house” vocational course following the National Skills Profile run by OCR. This will replace the TCAT course. This new course allows pupils to gain credit for each module they complete. It is based around the key skills of communication, numeracy and ICT and will thus support work being done by the pupils in other lessons.  We also intend to arrange work placements as part of the vocational element of the course. Thus PRG will be spent in buying staff time to run the course and arrange placements. In essence, this new course promises to be very flexible, so that it can be adapted to meet the needs of each pupil.

In summary, the target group for our PRG spending has specifically been those pupils for whom the demands of 8 or 9 GCSEs would simply lead to disaffection.

Ercall Wood’s use of the PRG has been a balance between putting systems in place to chase unauthorised absences whilst at the same time providing support and an appropriate curriculum for each pupil.

Contact:

B.Warren.         Deputy Head                 Ercall Wood Technology College.