Blacon Education Village

Within the footprint of Blacon Education Village there are 9 super output areas. Six of the super output areas  are classified as being amongst the 5% most deprived in the County. Just over 96% of the population in the footprint area are white British with 1.3% of the remaining 3.7% classifying themselves as white. Within the footprint area 30% of those living in the urban wards are economically inactive and 20% of those living in the rural ward. In terms of qualifications 45% of the residents have none.

In the past the schools operated as separate organisations within the area and a feature of the area was that many children were moved by parents from one school to another.

BEV was established three years ago and has been committed to bringing settings together to enhance learning opportunities for families and promote an ethos of collaboration between schools to staff families and other organisations. In order for this to be achieved the headteachers and leaders of these seven settings have met regularly over the past three years looking at how they address common issues. The vehicle to drive this has been a shared development plan which involved the cooperation of all of the seven settings.

Initially all of the work of BEV was driven by the 7 leaders, sourcing grants initiating training and skill sharing opportunities. As the momentum has gathered pace and there has been increased buy in, staff teams across the settings have started to take a lead on pieces of work.

Some examples of training and skill sharing are:

·      Solution Orientated Schools –SOS –

·      The Big Write

The BEV group meet monthly for a four hour meeting, they nominate a chair on an annual basis and all meetings have agenda items and minutes are taken and distributed. We have terms of reference for the group and an agreed decision making protocol. The group is made up of leaders who are committed to making a difference and changing outcomes for families.

The commitment to form this group was strong and there have been very few challenges. In the main the group tends to be more focused on primary issues and the involvement of just one senior school has been complex.

Initially there was some reluctance and a little confusion about why the children’s centre was involved, however as relationships have grown and developed there is now a greater understanding of the work of the children’s centre and a thorough understanding of how the work of the centre feeds into the schools over the long term.

The outcome from the group is that they have a strong leadership team who provide a high level of support to each other. They are able to work together towards shared ideas across the age range. Some of the benefits include:

·      Re-shaping the delivery of speech and language services, to start to address demographic need in relation to language and communication skills.

·      Through their learning mentors and family support workers, the delivery of a regular Webster Stratton parenting programme is taking place to support behaviour management. They have instilled a co-ordinated response to family learning across the footprint this includes workers from all settings participating in regular group supervision and planning sessions.

·      Shared  attendance and punctuality protocols, with shared exclusion processes. This has reduced the pupil movement across schools in the footprint.

·      Providing joined up opportunities that are open for ALL in each establishment there is greater community cohesion.

·      They are currently looking at how they use the disadvantaged subsidy as a cluster and hope to build on family learning success to deliver this.

·      As a leadership team they recognize the need to ensure sustainability for the future of BEV and feel this is beginning to bed in as small sub groups from our respective staff teams take responsibility for particular areas of the shared development plan.