|
|
|
Julie Nightingale looks at the support and advice now available to help school leaders support ‘frequent flyer’ pupils who change schools regularly.
Much attention has been paid in recent years to primary-secondary transition and the overwhelming effects that the quantum leap from one school phase to the next can have on a child academically and emotionally.
How much more difficult, then, is it for a child who changes school four or five times in their school life because their families move regularly? The children of service men and women are the most visible ‘frequent flyers’ but children whose families are travellers, who follow seasonal jobs around the country or whose parents come to the UK for temporary work can also find themselves repeatedly uprooted.
In the absence of a proper system for handling such pupil arrivals and departures, the changes can leave a child disoriented and a school dealing facing one more time-consuming set of problems.
For school leaders, high pupil mobility presents challenges but, fundamentally, it is about creating the right systems to enable children to be swiftly assimilated into the school population when they arrive and to ease their departure. It’s vital not to view the issue as a burden, says Mike Chislett of Service Children’s Education (SCE) which oversees the education of the thousands of children of UK services families based abroad.
“The children do need some support but we tell our schools that it should be handled positively and not be viewed only as ‘turbulence.’"
The strategy can be led and managed in different ways, he says. Some schools, where an understanding of the emotions a child is likely to feel as a single new arrival is well embedded, take a whole school approach, whereby supporting the child is seen as everyone’s responsibility and reinforced by the leadership team.
Others, where the issues are less familiar, may find it useful to designate a member of staff to manage the process of ensuring a child’s records have arrived, handling the school tour and induction process, even down to ensuring a child’s tray is labelled in class.
Data relating to a child moving schools frequently – the electronic common transfer form with test scores and recent assessments but also detailed records from previous schools – is particularly vital so the receiving school can grasp the fullest possible picture of the child, their progress to date and their likely needs.
Initial assessments by the receiving school should be carried out sensitively, Mike emphasises.
“We say there should be prompt but thoughtful assessment and it should not be in the form of a battery of tests when the child has just arrived. One or two schools do that, rather than using the assessment from the last school which has known the child well. They justify it by claiming they need to ‘establish a baseline’ but the trouble is that, this way, you establish a lower baseline every time a child moves.”
Handled well, frequent change of school can enable children to become adept at meeting people, and make relationships rapidly, Mike says. Through keeping in contact with children they meet in different places, they can also begin to see themselves as part of a bigger community.
NCSL has produced a toolkit specifically for leaders of schools which frequently welcome children of forces families. Developed with SCE following a two-year research project, the multimedia package features case studies and other good practice ideas, input from headteachers plus resources from SCISS (Service Children in State Schools) and CEAS (the MoD’s Children’s Education Advisory Service).
Although it draws on the experiences of services organisations, the content is transferable to schools with mobile populations of other kinds, says Simon Patton, project coordinator for NCSL.
“It is very much about best practice of all kinds and schools can take from it what suits their needs,” he says.
It is likely to expand in future to take further account of the Children’s Plan in England.
“For services families in particular, there’s the whole issue of how a parent’s deployment to a war zone affects a child and the turbulence it may cause in that child’s life. The Children’s Plan requires a broader view of what moving schools means for the child, not only in education terms but emotionally.” ldr
Next steps:
Link to Mitigating Mobility resources in talk2learn’s NSCL in Dialogue community at www.ncsl.org.uk/talk2learn. A full toolkit is scheduled to be available via the NCSL website in July |
 |
|
|
|
