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Southwark Guarantee: Electronic management of student attendance and progression pathways across multiple sites

Summary

Southwark Guarantee (www.southwarkguarantee.com) is the education administration portal used by the 14–19 Partnership in Southwark to manage mobility, curriculum choice, student tracking and an online area-wide prospectus. The site was developed in response to practical problems arising from the delivery of off-site provision in the borough, in particular:

1. tracking the whereabouts, attendance and progress of students studying in more than one institution
2. providing student information, advice and guidance about progression pathways within sector areas.

Services are provided by Southwark Guarantee in three key areas, contributing to the success and expansion of the borough’s off-site provision:

3. teacher/provider tools for managing off-site provision, including online attendance registers, incident alerts, protocol document storage and reports
4. a personal development e-portfolio offering students skills assessment, a progress file and an individual learning plan
5. an area-wide prospectus, ‘Plan Your Route’, which includes a course planner.

Introduction and background

Southwark has a culturally, socially, and ethnically diverse population of 251,300. Over 30% are from black minority ethnic communities. Over 100 languages are spoken within the community and the borough has a significant and growing refugee population. While there are major areas of regeneration, many small/medium enterprises and much creative business activity, there are large areas of deprivation. Poverty in Southwark is high, with 40% of students eligible for free school meals.

Ninety-three per cent of the primary school population lives in the borough. This decreases to 75% at secondary school, and further decreases to 32% post-16. A larger than average proportion of the population is children – 20% are aged under 15. The borough has a very high under-18 conception rate, a high incidence of HIV, sexually-transmitted infections, drug abuse and street crime, with young people identified as both perpetrators and victims. Most young offenders are male, aged between 15 and 19.

There are 15 secondary schools in Southwark of which four are academies. Next year two more will become academies, with plans for an additional school to become an academy once out of special measures. There is one city technology college, four Roman Catholic voluntary aided schools and one Church of England voluntary aided school, which leaves only two community schools. Roll predictions indicate a rising school population in Southwark for the next 5–10 years.

Young people gaining five A–C grades at GCSE (not including English and mathematics) has grown from 33.4% in 2000/1 to 47% in 2005/6, while young people accessing vocational qualifications at key stage 4 has grown from 1.2% of the key stage 4 population to 8% in 2005/6. At the same time the ‘not in education, employment or training’ rate has dropped from 15% in 2000/1 to 12% in 2005/6.

The approach

Southwark urgently needs to engage its learners and retain them in the borough. The area-wide inspection in 2000 highlighted the engagement problem. Although significant improvements have been made, the 2004 area-wide inspection shows that much work still needs to be done.

The borough started to implement a coordinated off-site provision offer incorporating the increased flexibility programme from 2002. At this time there were 102 key stage 4 students accessing off-site provision at Southwark College and various other providers. Improving the curriculum to offer more breadth to a diverse range of learners became a priority. A decision was made to grow the offer and increase the numbers accessing off-site provision and accessing vocational qualifications.

By 2003/4 the offer had grown to incorporate three colleges and 10 training providers. The numbers accessing provision from schools virtually doubled to 238 and looked set to grow. Southwark was also successful in a ‘Power to Innovate’ bid to allow four of the 11–16 schools to retain a small cohort of students for a further year where they had problems managing transition and were identified as students who dropped out at 17. The programme involved two days a week in school, two days at a training provider and one day on a work experience placement.

The sudden increase in numbers, although beneficial to the learners, posed a logistical problem to the local authority, the providers and the schools in terms of managing the mobility of the students. A management system was needed to facilitate this movement of students, drive culture change and help shift any resistance.

www.southwarkguarantee.com had been set up to host the Southwark Guarantee directory, a list of all 14–19 provision within the borough organised by sector area and level to highlight progression and to contextualise learning opportunities into the local labour market. The website and the directory had proved very successful with students, parents/carers and Connexions workers and seemed appropriate to house a management system for schools and providers.

Arc Software Consultancy, creators of the CareerWalesOnline national e-portfolio portal, collaborated with programme managers to design a web-based portal to provide key management services:

1. borough-wide student tracking and reporting
2. live cross-provider registers
3. student monitoring for progress

The system had to be simple to use, not contravene data protection regulations and only allow a school to access information for its own students.

This management service was built within www.southwarkguarantee.com as the ‘Professionals’ section for teachers and administrators.

General types of information, such as the offer, schemes of work from providers and protocols for exchanging students, are available online. Providers can use the system to take morning and afternoon registers online. That information goes directly to the appropriate school for the school coordinator to check and monitor. Incidents are reported live, and each half term reports are generated on each student’s progress, attendance and number of incidents reported. The system indicates where a student’s attendance is lower than 80% and also highlights where providers achieve lower than 80% attendance. This data can be passed to the local authority 14–19 data management group, and from there on to school achievement personnel and, where necessary, to education welfare officers.

The system gave schools confidence in sending students off-site, and gave providers a way to communicate directly and immediately with schools over incidents and non-attendance, signalling the end of countless faxes and phone calls. The numbers of students accessing off-site provision have grown to 600 and are expected to continue to rise, especially with the introduction of the Diplomas.

Individual Learning Plans

As schools and providers gain confidence in using the system, the potential of web-based management tools is also being explored. In preparation for the implementation of Diplomas, and for the current implementation of the Engagement Programme, an individual learning plan tracking system has been introduced in the ‘Professionals’ section of the website. This individual learning plan is for the use of professionals only; a student-owned individual learning plan is available in the student section, which makes use of Flashfolio – a secure web-based application that enables users to upload, store and view information – to track progress online.

The student individual learning plan contains a student profile, which includes results for key stages 2 and 3 and predictions for key stage 4, along with CAT scores and Fischer Family Trust information. It sets learning goals for individual students and for target reviews and captures achievement and destination data. This individual learning plan is shared among the multiple providers of a young person’s educational package.

It also houses schemes of work and units of delivery to support shared delivery and assessment of one qualification between institutions (functional skills could be an example) so that professionals in multiple institutions are able to check a student’s progress in a number of settings. The individual learning plan has been set up working to DCSF guidelines but also responds to local needs and a rapidly changing market. Diagnostic assessment tools have also been placed online to contribute to a baseline for students and enable some of the distance traveled to be measured.

Professionals can communicate about student progress through email and blogs, creating a virtual learning management environment.

Areas for development are:

1. the use of personalised technologies
2. user profiling for delivering differentiation across multiple settings
3. teacher authoring for virtual learning environments.

Signs of success

The system has helped the numbers of students accessing offsite provision to grow from 102 in 2003 to 600 at the time of this case study, and has seen a growth in the number of young people gaining vocational qualifications at key stage 4 from 1.2%  to 8%. The number of schools participating in the programme has grown from six to 11 with one special school and two pupil referral units, and the number of providers used by schools in the borough has grown from three colleges and five providers to three colleges and 15 providers with 52 courses now on offer.

Schools are now successfully managing their students’ programmes and changing the cultural practices of their delivery to cater for personalised learning.

Following the success of www.southwarkguarantee.com, Arc has introduced management systems to other London boroughs, including Islington, Lewisham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Newham, Lambeth, Hounslow, Barking and Dagenham and Richmond. The platform is also in use outside in Surrey, York, Bournemouth, Exeter and across Wales.

Conclusions

The tool underpins 14–19 reform and will become instrumental in the delivery of the diplomas. Across the country, 14–19 partnerships need to manage, in practical terms, the mobility of students across institutions, with greater emphasis on tracking students through the Every Child Matters agenda.

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