One aspect of the coalition government's education white paper that has passed with little comment is the proposed new approach to permanent exclusions.
According to the government, part of the answer to improving alternative provision, is to make schools ‘responsible for finding and funding alternative provision themselves’ and to make schools accountable for the pupils they exclude by counting them in the school performance tables. This, it is hoped, will create an incentive for schools to avoid excessive exclusions and ensure any alternative provision is appropriate and high quality.
But how can head teachers judge what the high quality alternative provision is, and if they can't find anything suitable locally how should they develop their own? If they choose to develop their own onsite provision how can head teachers be sure what they offer will work?
A new report funded by CfBT Education Trust, Achieving successful outcomes through Alternative Education Provision, highlights essential characteristics of effective alternative provision. The report suggests that effective alternative provision has high expectations, involves a challenging curriculum, is flexible and tailored to the individual based on assessed needs and interests.
The emphasis needs to be on a personal approach: delivery by high quality ‘caring and knowledgeable’ staff with high staff/learner ratios in a trusting and respectful environment that cultivates a strong sense of connection among and between students, families, teachers and the wider community.
The white paper also says the government will address the lack of a ‘common or transparent measure’ of the quality of alternative provision, where it is not inspected by Ofsted, by introducing a quality mark for alternative provision or through tighter regulation of provision.
This may be problematic, as there is a lack of rigorous research to show what actually works. The design of a common measure is especially troublesome because some outcomes are difficult to measure, some may not emerge until well after the intervention and some cannot be attributed solely to alternative provision.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that disengaged young people are not a homogeneous group; no single set of outcomes is equally relevant and meaningful to all young people, or to the other key stakeholders - parents/carers, funders, providers and government.
Making schools responsible for finding and funding alternative provision themselves and the introduction of a quality mark may indeed have a positive impact on the quality of alternative provision - but we need to pause for a moment and consider just what we mean by 'quality' in alternative provision.
We must take care to ensure that any judgement of quality actually measures what alternative provision is designed to do and achieve, and takes into account where pupils are starting from - it must measure progress made, not just an end point of attainment of a qualification. It must reflect the processes and structures that work for alternative provision not those that work in mainstream schools and it must be able to cope with the diversity of provision that falls under the alternative education banner.
This sounds as if it is asking a lot of a new quality mark but it is essential that we get this right. We cannot afford to fail young people who are placed in Alternative Education Provision. If we do, we not only fail those young people but we also fail as a society.
Paul Gutherson is a research consultant employed by CfBT Education Trust and is one of the co-authors of Achieving successful outcomes through Alternative Education Provision, which can be downloaded from the CfBT website
