Teenagers Falling Through The Gaps

This analysis by the Children’s Commissioner for England reveals that thousands of teenagers in England are falling through the gaps in the school and care systems.

The report sets out the risks affecting tens of thousands of teenagers including persistent absence from school, exclusions, alternative provision, dropping out of the school system in Year 11, or going missing from care.

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      string(5688) "Vol 4.1 n www.teachingtimes.comHealthEvery Child Journal70ReducingteenagepregnancyThe UK has the highest levels of teenagepregnancies in Western Europe. In Bradford,the rate of under-18 conceptions was57.2 per 1,000 and the local authority wasranked 234th in the country. It was one of 112 LocalAuthorities with a rate of under-18 conceptionsabove 51.1 per 1,000 population.Bradford is one of the 15 most deprived localauthorities in the country with a unique set of socio-economic issues. It’s against this backdrop thatBradford embarked on its challenging programmeto reduce teenage pregnancy rates.Teenagers who become parents are at higherrisk of long-term social exclusion due to the positionthey find themselves in. They often find themselvesisolated from the support they need and in povertyand can end up raising their children alone. If theyleave education when they become pregnant, a lackof qualifications and a lack of available time to getback into education can trap them in poverty for therest of their lives.Reducing the rate of teenagepregnancy has been an elusivegovernment goal for many years.But now, it seems that the tide isturning, with some areas achievingspectacular results. Nicola Corriganoutlines how Bradford halved itsrates.www.teachingtimes.com n Vol 4.1Health Every Child Journal71Children born to teenage mothers generally face disadvantage. They are morelikely to have poor health, do badly at school while early pregnancy also raises the riskof infant mortality. Studies also show daughters of teenage mothers are more likely tobecome teenage mothers themselves, continuing the cycle of early parenthood andsocial exclusion.Reducingteenagepregnancy“Developingthe skills andconfidence theyneed to deal withreal life situationsand supportingthem to delay earlysex is important.”Who’s vulnerable? Risk factors associated with teenage pregnancy40 per cent of girls in local authority care become mothers before they reach 20, three times the average inEngland.Being a daughter of teenage mum.Ethnic groups over-represented in teenage pregnancy figures are mixed white and black Caribbean, other blackand white British. Asian ethnic groups under-represented.Parental aspirations – research shows that a mother with low educational aspirations is an important predictorof teenage motherhood.Teenage motherhood – 20 per cent of under 18s go on to have a subsequent birth whilst still a teenager.Low education attainments – Those with low levels of education, even when other deprivation factors are takeninto account, are twice as likely to become pregnant.40 per cent of teenage mums have no qualifications when they leave school. After the age of 16, 29 per cent ofthose with no qualifications give birth to a baby compared to just 1 per cent of those with qualifications.Early sexual activity.Poor contraception advice or access to services.Mental health, social disorder and involvement with crime are other risk factors.nnnnnnnnnnChanges in sex educationGetting young people to talk openly with parents and professionals about issues andfeelings is an important part of the modern strategy to deal with sexual health andissues around relationships.Developing the skills and confidence they need to deal with real life situationsand supporting them to delay early sex is important. It equips them to stay safeand healthy when they do become sexually active and helps them appreciate thechallenges and responsibilities of parenthood.Moreover, tackling teenage conceptions means addressing a wide range of issuesfrom welfare and housing to social care, health care and education and requiresworking across voluntary, health and local authority sectors.In Bradford it was decided that no one single issue was going to be able to workon its own and in isolation. A coordinated young person’s sexual health and teenagepregnancy team was created with a dedicated budget.George McQueen, Assistant Director of Access and Inclusion, says: “Teenagepregnancy is everyone’s problem. As well as the impact on the parents, it also has animpact on their family, friends, school or place of work.“We decided on creating a holistic approach to the issue. Tackling one part of theproblem will only get you so far, but if you make it everyone’s issue, fewer people aregoing to fall through the gaps.“There aren’t any quick fixes either. Changing behaviours, improving educationand awareness of the issues involved can’t be delivered overnight or in a single year.“Being the daughter of a teenage mother is the strongest predictor of teenagemotherhood, so good practice now will have an impact on future generations.”Vol 4.1 n www.teachingtimes.comHealthEvery Child Journal72First stepsWe started by looking at the services across the Bradford District to assess how youngpeople access and use them. A partnership of key organisations covering the NHS,Bradford Council and voluntary organisations formed a project called Upfront to tackle theissue.After looking at best practice, one of the first things the group did was to identify amodel of practice. They agreed on the one developed by Teenage Pregnancy Associateswhich lists 10 key factors that work to reduce teenage conceptions:1. Good quality Sex and Relationship Education (SRE) in schools2. Parents talking about SRE3. Aspiration building4. Effective use of local data5. Early intervention and targeting6. SRE in youth and outreach services7. Staff trained in SRE8. Strong messages to young people and professionals9. Young people centred contraceptive and sexual health services10. Strategic"
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Special Needs

Reducing teenage pregnancy

11 Dec 2013

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      string(5486) "Sometimes the message is not what it seems – schools are closed but still supporting the community in many waysIndustry newsThe pandemic has impacted every aspect of society, fromschool closures to hospitality and event cancellations. For the team atFlashAcademy, the UK’s leading digital language learning platform for Englishas an Additional Language (EAL), this meant the cancellation of two major EALevents in both Birmingham and London. As an alternative tothese paid events, FlashAcademy have started to put on free CPD webinars foreducators supporting learners with EAL. Thousands of teachers, teaching assistants and support stafftuned in to learn about supporting the healthand wellbeing of EAL pupils, managingprovision in high-need schools, languageawareness, doublingattainment for EAL learners and so much more! 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Digital Learning

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2 Dec 2020

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      string(5769) "Only 51% of households earning between £6000-10,000 have home internet access The closure of all educationalestablishments was a shock to pupils, parents and schools alike. Pupils andteachers were forced to operate remotely at very short notice, pupils received fewer learning hours and had theircurriculum cut, and much of the work set by schools assumed families had accessto devices and home internet. Study after study  showed that these changes disproportionately impacted pupils from lower income homes. Digital Access West Yorkshire’s Claire Garside reflects:“Lockdown happened very quickly andat a time when most schools didn’t have a school-wide policy for remoteteaching and learning. Teachers from all classes or subjects hadn’t receivedany/enough training and support to be able to adapt to the change incircumstances. Digital exclusion and the impact on educational attainment,health and wellbeing needs to be addressed – people/families need to besupported to get online and connect with others.”Home accessIt’s easy to forget that digital is neither universal nor free. 22% of the UK’s population have lacked basic digital skills since long before the Covid-19 outbreak, and the less you earn, the less likely you are to spend your money on an internet connection. For example, only 51% of households earning between £6000-10,000 have home internet access, compared with 99% of households with an income of over £40,001.It’s clear that throughout thiscrisis, schools have been working hard to try to give their pupils the bestopportunities possible. But tasking children with work to do online assumed agood internet connection and access to appropriate devices. From the stats above, we can see thatthis approach excludes almost half of low income homes, and, to add insult toinjury, those children falling through the cracks are already less likely to succeedat school. When schools set learning tasks that require an internet connectionat home, the gap is only likely to grow further during this crisis. Teaching staff are of courseconfronted with the harsh realities of these inequalities every day. As one head teacher said:“I was talking to one family onFriday, when I was delivering free meals. I did take them a paper pack of work,because Mum said it was ‘pay the wi-fi or feed the children’ this month…Sometimes people simply can’t afford to pay for wi-fi.”To extract maximum learning potentialfrom the tech, there needs to be reinforcement across the board: socially andculturally as well as practically. The kit is just the start While it’s a great start to make devices available in family homes, there also needs to be a sensitivity to how the tech is used – what role does it play in the home? What happens if we try to change the purpose of familiar tools? Are children emotionally ready to repurpose their ‘toys’ for learning? This, coupled with the practicalconstraint of inaccessible devices, poses serious challenges to learning fromhome. Another head teacher explained:“The majority of children in schoolaren’t accessing any of the online learning that we’ve set. I know that some ofthem don’t have reliable internet. Most of them who have anything have phonesor tablets. They’re often shared with siblings, so their access to somethingappropriate to work on is quite limited.”The Government acknowledged the issueup to a point, distributing 200,000 laptops and six-month internet accesspasses to care givers and disadvantaged pupils, but even this failed to addressthe magnitude of the problem.Distributing equipment was a goodstart, but it was exactly that: just a start. It relied on the idea thatparents, on the whole, have the time, skills and space at home to supportschool work outside of the school environment. Parental engagement A survey of teachers by the National foundation for Education Research (NfER) found that just 55 percent of parents were engaged in their child’s learning, while a UCL study suggested that pupils learning at home spent 2.5 hours a day on school work, on average, with one in five doing less than an hour a day. That means that two million children in the UK were doing less than five hours of work a week, many of them were in the free school meals category.Issues for teachers Even if students can do their work, there can be issues with assessment. Evaluating academic progress in these conditions is very difficult without knowing the hours spent or what opportunities the pupils have had to engage with the material. It’s worth noting that setting and assessing work remotely can be extremely labour intensive for teachers, who feel a great deal of care and responsibility towards their students and have rapidly had to convert their tried-and-true methods to suit the new landscape. One teacher told us:“The most surprising thing was howmuch work was involved; it wasn’t a case of setting some work for an hour inthe morning and taking the rest of the day off.”Digital literacy is another, oftenoverlooked, part of the equation. 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Blogs

What Happened To Learning During The Lockdown In Leeds?

28 Sep 2020

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      string(4818) "mind about what is being shown, showed just how creative the children could be.  Crucially, they also allowed children to reveal their biases or open up about their deepest held thoughts and feelings; where Tyler saw a couple looking over an orange field basked in evening sunlight, Jordan saw people fleeing a fire ripping through crops.Mr Blacker said: “Our children so often teach us too, it has been humbling work to do.  And now they are creating their own mental health focussed projects.”Nicole, 10, offered her own idea on a mental health art project centred around Russian dolls – “we’ve all got Russian dolls inside us, of the different sides of ourselves we show.”  Amy, 8, built on the Frozen theme by turning one of the youth club walls into an ‘ice wall’ – where Elsa built up a wall to keep people away, the children built a wall of coping strategies and hope.  And Nick, 19, spent time developing a 3D artwork depicting how having a mental health problem can both feel to a sufferer and look to those on the outside: “you might feel like you’re trapped in a cage by your own thoughts, while others might feel you’re locking yourself away.”Teenagers Ellie, 13, and James, 14, drew their own inspiration to develop work around ambition and inspiration, latterly.  As a young man with profound learning difficulties, James’s idea and execution of his own project was all the more profound for the youth workers.Jed Sullivan, a youth worker and manager at the club, said: “We say that as a good youth worker, you should be able to render yourself obsolete – that is, it is our job to equip these children with the tools to cope when there’s no adults there to guide them or when they are adults.  Our young people coming in with their own ideas for projects is absolutely that.”Once children had completed a few weeks’ worth of work in the club, they were invited to take some home to share their learning with parents, carers and siblings.  With support from local attractions to incentivise participation, dangling a carrot of free Blackpool Zoo or Sandcastle entry, a questionnaire titled Heads Together for families to complete together was formulated for children to talk about emotional wellbeing with family members in an informal way.Mr Blacker said: “It was an opportunity for families to learn together and for parents to understand the work their children do at youth club.  It saw children and parents learn about each other and how they cope with life.“More than half our children took part in the Heads Together project and we saw that what we were teaching them was really being absorbed.  It was great to see family members and parents taking the time to talk things over with the children.  All agreed that it was helpful and that they’d been able to identify coping strategies.”Case StudyAlisha, 13: “I’ve been through a tough time recently; my mum and dad have split up and I know my mum is struggling.  When Dave told us about this project at youth club I knew it would probably help me.  I also thought it would give me a chance to talk to the youth workers without drawing too much attention just to myself.  I took the questionnaire home to do with my mum.  At first she wasn’t paying much attention so I told her it was important and asked her to come off her phone.  She listened to me and realised it was important.  We talked about how to stay fit, be happy, keep your friends and succeed in life, and ways to keep calm when things don’t go your way.  As soon as we’d done it I knew we’d both learned something from it and something about each other.”ConclusionBBGC’s work has attracted interest across the town, including being adopted by Park School, an Ofsted outstanding rated school for children with disabilities, and The Harbour, Lancashire’s mental health hospital, located in Blackpool.  The local newspaper has also covered the work, with an article titled “Young show it’s good to talk”.  And the project has received high praise from professionals in the mental health field.Ashok Khandelwal, Blackpool’s former manager of primary care mental health services, told the local paper: “I was pleasantly surprised and impressed with the kind of emotional intelligence of our youngsters.  They respond to [this work] in a most constructive and positive way.”Teenager Danielle, 13, said: “It made me realise the importance of having good mental health, the same as keeping fit and healthy in other ways.”Jed Sullivan is a BBGC Trustee."
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Behaviour

The Blackpool Boys and Girls Club

16 Oct 2017