In November, the government concluded its consultation on extending the remit of Virtual School Heads (VSHs) to include responsibilities for previously looked-after children. The role of VSH became statutory for local authorities with the passage of the Children and Families Act 2014 and these proposed changes will expand an already challenging role.
VSHs currently have responsibility for promoting the educational achievement of looked-after children. As they have a much higher special educational needs and disability (SEND) rate than the general population, are disproportionately represented in non-mainstream provision and their education and emotional wellbeing is adversely affected by changes in both care and school placements, the scale of VSHs’ existing task enormous.
We have concerns about the ability of VSHs to perform their expanded role given the steep decline in local authorities’ spending power since 2009-10. It scarcely needs pointing out that historically grant-funding dependent authorities, such as those in the North East, have fared even worse than elsewhere. As the VSH must be a local authority officer, likely holding other roles within the local authority, there is a sense among school leaders of the VSH role being pushed down the agenda when authorities are under significant financial pressure. Regional headteachers also report a high turnover of VSHs in some areas, with one telling us “austerity has led us to a place where there is very little consistency”.
And consistency is what looked-after children need most in their lives. Research by the Rees Centre and the Universities of Oxford and Bristol, the first to look at links between education outcomes and care histories, identified significant differences in outcomes based on their level of stability at home and school. It concluded that those who have been in care longer perform better than those in short-term care, that every additional care placement post-11 was associated with one-third of a grade less at GCSE and young people who moved school in Year 10 and 11 achieved more than five grades less than those that didn’t.
Virtual school metrics
From a school leader’s perspective, one of the challenges we have heard about is dealing with the bureaucracy created by the varying paperwork and information requirements of VSHs. Because the same VSH will follow a child who has moved between local authorities, schools can end up having to respond to multiple VSHs in a number of different ways. The confusion, delays and missed deadlines that can result don’t do anything to help looked-after children. There is also a feeling that VSHs can be impersonal and unwilling to get directly involved in the welfare of looked-after children. One headteacher told us that virtual schools sometimes feel like they are just a data collection exercise on looked-after children for the DfE, though practice (and resourcing) will, of course, vary by area.
But what exactly does the evidence show about the impact of VSHs so far? It is difficult to say. In 2012, admittedly before the role became statutory, Ofsted’s report The impact of virtual schools on the education of looked-after children found no robust evidence of improved educational outcomes, although it did note a number of other positive developments. Gauging their impact on this measure alone is problematic, however. Looked-after children as a group are fluid, so looking at progress through key stages as Ofsted did may not be the fairest way to judge progress. We are not tracking the same group of children here. Other obvious indicators show some small improvements: for example, there has been a slow decline in the percentage of looked after children with at least one period of fixed exclusion and the number of persistent absentees in this group has fallen a little. It is difficult to know, however, how much of this is attributable to VSHs.
One extremely important metric by which the performance of VSHs should be measured is how well they assist looked-after children in accessing mental health services. Looked after children and young people in care suffer from a significantly higher incidence of mental health disorders than others. A 2015 NSPCC report, Achieving emotional wellbeing for looked after children, suggested 46.4 per cent of looked-after children had a mental health disorder, compared to 8.5 per cent of non-disadvantaged children in the general population aged 5-17, and 14.6 per cent of disadvantaged children, which is similar to previous findings.
Falling through the cracks
While they clearly have a high need for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), schools’ ability to access the right help for this group can be limited. CAMHS will not start therapeutic treatment until a child is deemed to be “settled”, which, frankly, will mean that for some children it will probably never happen. Regional headteachers tell us this is one of the key ways in which they see looked-after children falling through the cracks in the system and they want to see VSHs acting as champions for this group.
The points I have raised and the feedback we have heard from local headteachers lead me to question whether VSHs should continue in their present form. Underfunded local authorities will struggle to fulfill their expanded roles, as the National Association of Virtual School Heads has acknowledged - and their placement within local authorities is problematic. Most VSHs have prior local authority experience, but no experience of senior school leadership roles.
It may be better to draw VSHs from the ranks of “real” headteachers, with the VSH preferably being the most experienced local headteacher. This is one of the areas where proper collaboration between local headteachers with a “corporate parenthood” role for looked-after children in the locality could have a positive impact. They could then work together to stop children from being moved around and prioritise their access to specialist and additional services. In this scenario, the government’s addition of responsibility for previously looked after children, which I mentioned at the beginning of the article, could prove to be a more worthwhile development.
VSHs are perhaps the only constant in some looked-after children’s lives. It is important that we think about how this role might be reshaped to make an even bigger difference in improving outcomes for this highly vulnerable group of young people.
Mike Parker is the director of Schools NorthEast
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