Breaking Barriers to Learning in Primary Schools

An Integrated Approach to Children's Services

Pat Hughes

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135264680
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Breaking Barriers to Learning in Primary Schools takes an expert and informative look at the integrated children's services agenda in practice in today's primary schools. Examining the ways in which an increasing number of different professionals help to improve children's life chances, the author examines the roles of those employed directly by the schools themselves, for instance Learning Mentors, HLTAs and Teaching Assistants, and those employed by health/social and other agencies, such as school nurses, Educational social workers, study support workers, school attendance workers and Educational Psychologists.

Through an exploration of how each individual helps break down barriers to children's learning, this book:

• examines the growth and development of the children's workforce
• provides a broad and integrated view of the wider school network
• explores the roles of individuals within the school workforce
• makes links to Every Child Matters and Extended Schools initiatives
• provides evidences of breaking down barriers, through interviews and studies with those working at the heart of integrated schools
• presents an analysis of recent statistics relating to children's lives
• gives practical advice for good practice throughout.

An essential text for all those working in education and in training to become part of this wider school network, this book takes into account the findings of the recent Primary Reviews, government data and original research to fully explain how to build, maintain and successfully work with today's primary children. It is an excellent text for Foundation Degree students as well as those studying Education Studies and those training to be teachers.

CHAPTER 1
The Wider Children’s Workforce in Primary Schools

The government considers the children’s workforce to mean everyone who works with children and young people and their families, or who is responsible for improving their outcomes.

Building Brighter Futures: Next Steps for the Children’s Workforce (Department for Children, Schools and Families 2008)

Chapter overview

Identify what is currently meant by the term ‘wider school workforce’

Define the meaning of ‘educational professionals’ in the context of this book

Evaluate the value, to those in the wider school workforce, of two models for managing change.

The changing nature of primary school personnel

Figure 1.1 provides an overview of the Core and Wider Children’s Workforce and is adapted from the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) 2008 document Building Brighter Futures. It was later extended in a further DCSF publication 2020 Children and Young People’s Workforce Strategy. At present, the DCSF separates out a Core Children’s Workforce and a Wider Children’s Workforce. It defines the core as those professionals who work or volunteer with children, young people and their families, or who are responsible for their outcomes all the time. The Wider Children’s Workforce is defined as those who work or volunteer with children, young people and/or their families part of the time, or who are responsible for their outcomes as part of their jobs. Interviews in the second part of this book cover both.

I have narrowed the focus to children of compulsory school age in primary schools, i.e. from 5 to 11 years. One reason for this is because the Foundation Stage, birth to 5

FIGURE 1.1 The core and wider children’s workforce. Adapted from DFCS (2008)

years, in its widest sense, deserves a book of its own, as do the secondary and special needs sectors, although there are many overlapping features.

I have also tried to limit the focus to those members of the wider school workforce who come into primary school to work directly with children, but have also provided some examples of professionals who work with primary children outside schools, for example the Study Support coordinator. This distinction is disappearing slightly, as more and more schools house multi-agency workers; for example children’s centres attached to a primary school may have rooms on site for ‘travelling’ educational professionals, such as speech therapists and educational psychologists. Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) share and build new multipurpose health clinics alongside primary schools, so primary carers can take themselves and their children to the GP, nurse practitioner or dentist on their way to and from school.

Sometimes you might hear the terms ‘paraprofessional’ or ‘allied professionals’ used to describe school-based professionals, such as teaching assistants, but this is a rather demeaning term that denies the specific professional skills they require in order to fulfil their responsibilities.

The Training and Development Agency (TDA) refers to ‘learning support staff’, and this covers teaching assistants (TAs), Higher Level Teaching Assistants (HLTAs), nursery nurses, cover supervisors, pupil support workers, administrative staff, specialist and technical staff, site staff and school business managers. The website, at the time of writing, covered a section on support staff roles, career development, national occupational standards, training and qualification. However, there is surprisingly little information on many other support roles, or on the much wider aspects of support staff roles in relation to the Integrated Children’s Workforce.

Ofsted and the wider school workforce

Interestingly enough, Ofsted, in their 2008 report on the wider school workforce, made this a specific recommendation for the TDA. They visited 23 primary and secondary schools to evaluate how effectively the reforms to the workforce had been implemented. They looked at deployment, training and development of the wider workforce, and the impact on the quality of teaching and learning and on the lives of the pupils and their families. This overambitious remit resulted in a report of just 23 A4 pages but it did recommend that the TDA should help the wider workforce and their managers to gain a ‘secure knowledge and understanding of the national occupational standards and the career development framework by providing accessible information and guidance’.

None of the 28 people whom I interviewed mentioned or seemed to know about the national occupational standards or the career development framework, although several did mention professional development. This perhaps links with another of Ofsted’s 2008 recommendations that schools need ‘to improve their detailed knowledge and understanding of the role of the TDA and make full use of the national occupational standards and the career development framework to develop the wider workforce’.

Meanwhile, Ofsted will continue to monitor the effectiveness of the reforms to the school workforce and this book will, hopefully, contribute to the knowledge base for that workforce in any one primary school.

Defining the educational professional in primary schools

Many of those attending the safeguarding conference, mentioned earlier in the introduction, would not have defined themselves as either members of the wider school workforce or educational professionals – the governors and the vicar for example. The role of the educational professional in this book, however, is defined very widely to include all of those whose role and responsibilities include working with children in school. It is recognised that they are multiprofessional, as well as being multi-agency workers.

By defining them as being ‘educational professionals’ when working with primary school children we acknowledge that there is a specific educational expertise that is needed to do this work effectively. There is a knowledge and skills base that enhance children’s learning and which those working with children either have or need to develop.

There is an acknowledgement within the current documentation that a children’s workforce ‘encompasses a diverse range of professions and occupations’. This includes people with a wide range of professional identities. It also includes people with very different levels of qualification, training, employment arrangements, and terms and conditions under which they work. Educational professionals may also work in the public, private and/or third sector, or they may be volunteers, as the interviews in the second part of this book demonstrate. Even here it is sometimes difficult to identify whether a ‘professional’ is that part of their role for which they are paid or their volunteer role. For example, one of the parent volunteers interviewed was also a paid welfare assistant in the same school and both she and the school had difficulty distinguishing some of the different aspects of what she did.

There are specific issues here that are related to professional identities and terms and conditions of work, which lead to some specific challenges, and, operationally, we should be thankful that so many educational professionals seek to make a difference in children’s lives and prioritise that.

Here in this book we also look at some people who work mainly with adults, such as the parent mentor and the healthy schools manager, but whose work is also related to improving children’s lives and breaking down barriers to learning.

Professional identity

Health workers, such as school nurses, who come into school and work with children, are specifically trained in their own profession, for example health. So their ‘professional identity’ is health, and their work in schools makes them a specific sort of ‘educational professional’. The interview with the school nurse in Chapter 10, however, challenges this assumption that the school nurse is regularly in primary schools. Increasingly, training for ‘professional identity’ will involve more practice in other settings and training with people from other disciplines. This has already led to the creation of new forms of posts, for which individuals are trained more generically and professionals become, in theory, less defined by their initial and more specific professional identities. In this particular case, the school nurse was no longer responsible, at an operational level, for doing the screening; this job was now undertaken by specially trained workers who were paid at a much lower rate than the nurse. The nurse’s role was to oversee the results of the screening and organise any follow-up if required.

School workforce reform also challenges the traditional view of a professional as ‘an occupation that controls its own work, organized by a special set of institutions sustained in part by a particular ideology of expertise and service’ (Friedson 1994) or dual professionalism as ‘an ideology of expertise and service which is drawn from two occupations, which are organised by two special sets of institutions’.

In the past, considerable research has been carried out into ‘professional identity’ and how it can be developed initially and then changed as required. A summary of this research by Brott and Kajs (2001) suggests some key points for success in developing ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 The Wider Children’s Workforce in Primary Schools
• CHAPTER 2 Setting the Scene: Differential Performance in Primary Schools
• CHAPTER 3 Tackling Poverty: From Beveridge to ‘Every Child Matters’
• CHAPTER 4 Learning and Concepts of Childhood
• CHAPTER 5 Identifying and Lifting Hidden Curriculum Barriers for Children
• CHAPTER 6 Change and Challenges for Primary Schools
• Introduction to Part 2
• CHAPTER 7 Teaching Assistants
• CHAPTER 8 Mentors
• CHAPTER 9 ‘An Exceptional Pastoral Care Team’: A Case Study
• CHAPTER 10 Attendance, Health and Study Support
• CHAPTER 11 Case Study: LA Integrated Working
• CHAPTER 12 Public Services: Police and Fire
• CHAPTER 13 Charity, Consultants and Volunteers
• CHAPTER 14 Believe in Children
• Bibliography
• Index