Pupil Engagement Team - Orkney Island Council: What did you learn?
This section contains observations and reflections from the partner’s involved in delivering the project, specifically detailing advice and guidance, challenges and solutions and lessons learned from their perspective.
It is important that all partners involved have clarity on the purpose of the project and buy into the concept from the beginning. It is helpful to have a shared language and a memorandum of understanding to scaffold and manage expectations. This includes school staff understanding youth work and youth work approaches.
It helps thereafter to have a key link (ideally from senior management and guidance staff) within the schools to discuss evolving needs. Having designated space(s) in the school to work is critical to feel like part of the system.
It is important for the local authority’s education department to be aware, involved and supportive of the work to ensure effective implementation and address sustainability.
Agreeing a system and frequency of reporting with schools is helpful for monitoring progress and impact. There are often different mechanisms for capturing and reporting information, so it is helpful to record information on SEEMiS to ensure it is accessible for guidance staff, and others, to keep up to date with the progress being made.
Initially, there were some misinterpretations of the role of the Pupil Engagement Team. Therefore, sessions were delivered to inform school staff on the purpose and remit of the Pupil Engagement Workers and how they use a different approach and can link to wider community opportunities.
Short term funding is problematic. It can make it challenging to retain staff in short-term funded posts. Fundamentally, the success of the Pupil Engagement Team is the relationships built over time between staff, children and young people and their families. The consistent access to individual children and young people’s trust helps them to feel a sense of belonging and a positive connection to school. Therefore, the uncertainty of funding is challenging when considering the negative impact on the school community without it.
The Pupil Engagement Team would identify a key contact to work with in each school from the beginning. Whilst this can’t be guaranteed due to changes in personnel, it helps to establish regular communication and maintain positive relationships and connections from the outset. If the Pupil Engagement Team became permanent, the development of a Service Level Agreement, or equivalent document, to monitor the quality of the provision would be beneficial.
There is greater understanding on the many reasons why young people are not attending school. In the secondary school there are some cases where young people are marked as present, but they are not engaging in learning, or in the right place to be learning in a school environment at that time. Therefore, statistics do not show the whole picture.
Positive relationships with families are key to attendance and engagement with school. The Pupil Engagement Team have been able to reach previously unreachable individuals and to rebuild relationships with the education system for those families.
