Issue - meetings

To consider a report of the Head of the Virtual School.

Phil Mellen, Headteacher at the Virtual School attended to provide an overview of the work that his team performs and to provide an update on the results they have achieved so far.

He explained that since coming into existence on 1 September 2010, the Virtual School had continued to enable Cheshire East to take an overview of all its Cared for Children and their educational progress. One of the ways of doing this was to work closely with schools and in particular designated teachers. Phil Mellen reported that this assisted in information sharing and for channelling funding in the most appropriate and efficient manner.

Phil Mellen continued to assert that whilst the Virtual School did a lot of work to improve the educational attainment of Cared for Children; a child’s chance of doing well was heavily dependent on the stability of their placement. It was noted therefore, that it was necessary for the Virtual School to work to keep a child in the same school, minimising placement volatility. As a result, Phil Mellen reported that he sat on the fostering and adoption panel to provide an educational point of view to decisions around placement moves.

Referring to an additional sheet which provided a comparison on the educational attainment of Cared for Children in 2010 and 2011, Phil Mellen explained that whilst they obviously looked for improvement year on year, the data was volatile by nature as the cohort numbers were relatively small. As a result, the more telling figures would be a trend of improvement over several years. 

As a final point, Phil Mellen outlined a number of priority actions for 2011-12. These were as follows:

·         Early years

·         Key Stage 1

·         14-19

·         Improving the Personal Education Plan (PEP) format

·         Well-being

·         Establishing an Advisory Board.

A number of questions were asked around the performance figures for educational attainment. It was stated that a big improvement in Key Stage 4 results was required. Phil Mellen agreed but asserted that the trend from precedent authorities was for incremental change rather than for rapid progress. He continued to state that he expected the early intervention work to have a large effect on results over the next five years and that the success of the Virtual School as a concept would have to be judged then.

It was also queried whether the service was worried about the drop in Key Stage 2 results from 2010. Phil Mellen confirmed that whilst this was far from ideal the figure that the service was really concerned about was whether children were making a two level progress between Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 as this was a more accurate indicator of the work of the Virtual School. Attention was drawn to the fact that this had improved since 2010.

It was queried whether the Virtual School provided support for children or young people who were staying with relatives and/or not on a full care order. Phil Mellen explained that it was difficult to identify these children and  ...  view the full minutes text for item 102