Department for Education census data in January 2023 revealed there were 24,577 pupils in alternative provision (AP) settings. How many of those pupils return to mainstream?

Nowhere near enough, according to David Williams, director of inclusion at the Park Academies Trust, a multi-academy trust (MAT) made up of seven primary and secondary schools in the Swindon area.

Williams says that, in his experience, pupils “perceive a rejection from their home school” when they’re referred to AP and so they become unable or unwilling to return.

This issue was noted in this year’s SEND and AP Improvement Plan, which recommended “targeted early support within mainstream school” and ensuring any placement in an AP setting is “time limited”.

For Williams, this was a familiar solution: following Covid, he and the trust leadership formulated plans to set up their own time-limited AP provision for early intervention called the School of Solutions.

Now the first cohort has gone through, Tes takes a look at how it works and what the results have been. 

Solutions, not sanctions

Because the trust’s seven schools are in close proximity, the decision was made to base the AP unit in one of the schools.

Leadership chose one that had two mobile buildings previously used as an on-site private nursery and which required minimal updating beyond some new paint and furniture.

For the first cohort, 34 children with signs of needing early intervention were enrolled on a specially designed therapeutic programme to help develop their “emotional quotient skills”. 

Specifically, students in Years 7, 8 and 9 who showed signs of struggling with attendance or behaviour issues were identified. 

“Rather than use the programme for students with the highest level of need, we wanted to address issues with students who required early intervention,” says Williams.

Unlike an internal exclusion unit, these students were not being sent there as a sanction, or as a result of an incident of serious transgression of school rules; instead, students were chosen as they were displaying the early warning signs that their behaviour or attendance was going to be a problem later on.

To uncover these students, the trust created a simple two-page form for staff to fill in for students they felt would benefit from early intervention.

“We kept it very straightforward to minimise admin time,” says Williams. “The previous system required complex paperwork. It was a more laborious task and ran to several pages.”

‘Students can be in the AP programme the next day, rather than waiting for months’

He also streamlined the process by removing the need for a panel to consider each referral. Instead, Williams and another member of staff assess the forms and make a decision - although the senior leadership team also has oversight of any decision made.

Any member of staff can make the referral. The questions on the form focus on the type of behaviour and challenges the student has been facing, as well as background details about the student.

“This difference can mean students can be in the AP programme the next day, rather than waiting for months only to find the referral has been rejected,” Williams adds.

Parents are notified once the student has been chosen for the programme, and Williams says that this news is overwhelmingly met with “relief”. He says that, often, the parents are struggling too.

“We work closely with parents during the programme, and as a school we approach it from the angle that we are working together to support their son or daughter,” he explains.

“In our experience, enrolling students on to the programme has helped salve relationships between home and school that have previously been fractious.”

Relationship building

Once part of the unit, the students are enrolled on a 12-week programme whereby they spend two days in the unit and three days in their home school.  

“Although the unit was new to them, all the key things stayed the same: same uniform, same school day times, same senior team,” says Williams.

While the two days in the unit are not spent on core curriculum work, Williams says that the approach actually “minimises the problem of missing curriculum time” as the school “found we were adding curriculum time because the students who were attending the AP had previously high levels of absence [and] once in the programme, their attendance would jump up”.

In the unit, students spend the first five weeks learning about building relationships by covering basic social skills such as taking turns, listening to others and cooperating in a group setting.

“We essentially cover the early developmental stages,” says Williams.

Because of this, Williams hired primary school teachers to staff the setting because “they have a detailed understanding of the development stages” that children have to go through.

While hiring primary teachers into a new AP focused on secondary students may sound challenging, it was “much more straightforward than initially assumed” as a dip in birth rate has resulted in fewer pupils at key stage 1, meaning there are more primary teachers seeking jobs outside mainstream primary settings.

The final seven weeks of the programme are focused on group project work using a format Williams has borrowed from the corporate world called a “design sprint”.

“The way it works is that the 12 students in the group agree on a problem they want to make their focus of the project and then come up with a solution, working through specific stages,” explains Williams.

The idea, Williams says, is to get them to start thinking empathetically and from someone else’s point of view.

So, for example, one task involved students considering how to make the dining hall more accessible for wheelchair users, while in another task students looked at how they could convince people to stop driving to school to help improve the local environment.

“We do things like ‘Crazy 8s’ whereby students come up with wild and improbable suggestions for ways to solve the problem with the clock timing eight minutes. Then, as a group, they go through and pick out the good ideas.”

This way of working also requires students to debate and disagree, argue their case, learn how to vote as a group and use democratic leadership.

If this sounds like a set-up that is going to lead to students falling out, then that is very much the plan, says Williams, as conflict enables staff to “give students strategies and ways to manage emotions and cope with positive conflict resolution for when they’re back in the classroom full time”.

“These are important lessons, and it’s much easier to teach students how to cooperate and work well with others when we have them in a small group in the AP,” he says.

‘Huge success’

The programme was designed by Williams himself, alongside the two other teachers who work in the AP unit. However, Williams is quick to emphasise that the setting is “always evolving and always flexible” to ensure it suits the needs of the students who are accessing it. 

So far, more than 100 students have completed the programme, and of those, 80 have gone on to have improved attendance, with all staying on roll during the programme.

To put this into context, prior to having the School of Solutions, no students who had been referred to AP for intervention had ever returned to school.

‘You have to prioritise what the students in front of you need over hard and fast rules’

In terms of changing behaviour, Williams says “none of the students who have completed the 12-week programme have been subsequently excluded”.

“When you consider that these were students in our ‘at risk from exclusion’ group, this is a huge success,” he says. 

Of course, year-to-year comparisons are muddied by the pandemic and its after-effects. However, Williams is positive that playing the long game will eventually show in the data.

“We can already see that the students going through the programme are more likely to stay in school and less likely to be struggling with self-regulation,” he says.

The question of cost

Of course, despite this success, launching a new initiative is never cheap. So far, the cost is around £150,000 a year - chiefly on staff salaries - but Williams hopes to make it cost-neutral in the long run to make it sustainable and scalable.

The long-term plan is that schools in the trust “buy into the service using their normal general annual grant funding” and improve early interventions, thereby minimising the requirement for expensive external support elsewhere.

“Because we’re still working with a small number of students whom we class as being at ‘crisis point’ and are using costly external provisions, we are not currently cost-neutral,” explains Williams.

However, because it is “much more effective and better value” to put in place early intervention, he is confident that the investment will pay off “in the next five years”.

As well as considering costs, Williams’ advice to others thinking of doing something similar is to focus on early interventions and reduce the number of students leaving your setting.

“Early intervention is not about taking on the trickier cases in which problems have already become very serious,” he adds. “The aim is to try to stop problems before they start.”

On the practical side, Williams has a few other words of advice.

“In a small set-up, if you try to run an early-intervention AP with just one staff member, you need to plan what you will do if that staff member is absent,” he cautions.

“It becomes almost impossible to run. You will need to plan in that cover.”

Staying flexible

Williams also adds that geographical closeness between the home school and the AP has to be considered.

“It needs to be easy for staff to move between the schools, and this isn’t possible if the schools are spread too far apart”.

Finally, he has some advice about the amount of built-in flexibility your plans will need.

“You have to prioritise what the students in front of you need over hard and fast rules,” he says.

Williams gives the example of break and lunch, saying that for some children, “socialisation with their peers is crucial for their future success” whereas for other groups, it’s better to spend that time in a small group.

Beyond that, though, Williams says he sees no reason why other trusts could not set up something similar - indeed, he believes that more should so as to help reduce the pressure on AP and prevent more students from slipping out of mainstream education.

It’s a message others appear to be hearing, with Williams saying he has hosted visits from other MAT leaders to show them what the Park Academies Trust has done and how it works - an invitation he is keen to extend far and wide.

“We’re happy for any leader who wishes to visit or find out more about School of Solutions to come and see what we’re doing.”