Our Key Support
- Each officer oversees a cohort of Children and Young Persons (CYPs) and will attend one Personal Education Planning meeting each academic year
- Ensuring our CYPs attend school and have access to education
- Liaising with other boroughs and agencies to ensure all children in our care achieve the best outcomes
- Working with each school’s designated teacher to ensure Pupil Premium and Personalised Education Allowance is used on the most effective strategies for individual children in our care
- Advising and supporting all our stakeholders to ensure best outcomes for our CYPs
- Utilising Educational Psychologist time to support with next steps
- Developing enhanced transition support for our children
- Supporting young people in care to have post 16 and post 19 aspirations
- Providing advice and guidance for previously looked-after children (PLAC)
- Providing advice and guidance for post 16
Additional support available
Guidance
We provide a wide range of support, information, advice and training for schools, social workers, carers and other professionals proactively and in response to demand, delivered by experienced staff focused firmly on the end result of improving the outcomes for our children and young persons in care.
Supporting our colleagues through CPD
Our focus is to further develop best practice approaches that cover a range of issues directed at providing further support for all our children in care by way of meeting their needs. CPD courses can also be delivered remotely or in your school. CPD is also available as an INSET day.
Inclusion and attendance
One of our main priorities is to improve the inclusion and attendance of all our children in care, recognising the links between attendance and inclusion and take responsibility of securing and sustaining a suitable educational setting. We implement a variety of initiatives to ensure that including multi-agency meetings, sharing attendance data, contacting foster and social care colleagues when attendance is an ongoing, serious concern and discussions with attendance leads and designated teachers in schools.
Designated Teachers
We recognise the vital role that Designated Teachers have in supporting the education of children in care including new responsibilities. Our focus is to help staff meet their statutory duties in schools, look at some of the barriers that impact upon learning and how these can be addressed, how to best support and prepare our vulnerable children and young people with transition and share inclusive practice to best meet the needs of children in our care.
Beyond The Classroom
Children and young persons in our care have access to wider educational activities such as music through our Music Hub project, our Homework Club where all children and young people receive support with their homework and can also participate in other fun activities including sports and creative tasks. It provides a social setting for our children to come together and celebrate their special communalism.
Since September 2022 we have been able to our weekly homework club. Most of the same cohort returned and it was great to see them after such a long time. They all commented on how good it was to be back as they had missed it. We have new members of our team that have joined us at the club this year.
Our chef continues to provide a freshly cooked meal each week for the young people. At the start the menus are discussed and we again ‘theme’ some of these. The young people make a list of some of the meals they would like over the time, and this is taken into account over the year. We all sit together at the tables and eat at the same time. Each week we have a rota system, and two young people help to serve up the food to the others in the club which they all really enjoy. This is very important to us at the club as it allows us the time to sit with our cohort. It creates social opportunities for us to hear about their experiences and also to share a positive family environment.
New for this year, we have been working in partnership with Royal Greenwich Music Hub. We now have two members of staff with us one is a musician, the other is a voice coach. They have been working with some of our young people to prepare a song for this year’s Annual Awards ceremony. After this they will be teaching how to sing and play guitars, drums and keyboards. The younger cohort have been enthusiastic about this. We have realised that we have some very musically gifted young people in our club.
Want to know more? Contact either Andrea Fry on 0208 921 8036 or our main telephone number on 0208 921 5029