Collaborative Rights-based Approach to Improving Attendance and Learning Outcomes in School Communities - Edinburgh City Council: What did you learn?

Take time to build a strong coalition of partners, such as local authority youth work, third sector youth work and schools and ensure there is a clear shared purpose from the beginning. 

Ensure there is clarity about the group of young people and families that you want to hear from and why that is important. 

Ensure that partners are ready to take feedback on board and can take action in response to the consultation. 

It was expected that the feedback from young people and families in the target group was likely to be critical of support offered in schools and conversely very positive about youth work support. Whilst this proved to be the case, there were a number of parents and young people who clearly recognised and were sympathetic to the challenges that teachers face in managing a classroom environment. It required bravery and open-mindedness on the part of the schools.  

Careful dissemination of the feedback was important to recognise it represented the views of young people and families in the target group, but was not representative of views across a whole school setting. It was also important for schools to hear what the young people said about the value and difference of a youth work approach and how it helps them as learners. This was helpful to inform future partnership working but also to inform the design of support for young people who face barriers to learning in school. 

In sharing the thematic data, ethical principles were applied, and care was taken to ensure the purpose and target audience for the consultation were clearly explained. This helped to contextualise the critical views of participants and to account for the relatively small sample sizes. 

• Have a communications plan that is implemented following the collation of the consultation data. In Edinburgh, LAYC have identified opportunities to share the work more widely. Other localities adopting this approach would be encouraged to consider a communications plan in the initial stages of planning. 

• Ensure there is a clear process in place for feeding back to young people and families so that they can play an active role in shaping next steps. 

• Allocate resource at the outset for some very immediate implementation of ideas and recommendations made by young people and parents through the consultation. Some of the insights will require longer term planning, but it is important to demonstrate commitment to action. 

The work has reinforced the role that youth work can play in enabling all young people’s voices to be heard, as educators develop a response to the current challenges around school engagement and attendance. 

The consultation demonstrated the important role that youth work and school partnerships can play in addressing barriers to learner engagement and attendance. The value of taking a place-based approach was evident. It was clear from the initial consultation that there were marked and/or opposing differences in access and experience of provision. For example, one learning community had better access to community-based youth work support, while another had more firmly embedded youth work relationships with whole families than the other. Therefore, access didn’t always result in meaningful engagement and impact, but relied on a host of other factors, such as relationships.  

It's clear that young people need different options for support. For example, some young people need support to get back into school and into mainstream classes; other young people say their best chance is to learn outside of the classroom in smaller groups, ideally outside of the school environment where they have more choice about what and how they learn. The strength of a youth work approach is that it can be offered flexibly within school and in community settings. It starts from where young people are and works at their own pace.