Marie Greenhalgh knew she needed to make a change. Her students, who all had an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), were being forced to take - and pass - functional skills in three subjects: maths, English and ICT. For the majority, she believed it simply wasn’t achievable - high anxiety and mental health issues impacted on attendance, and many struggled to keep up with the work. Any small milestones that were reached by the students had no official recognition within the curriculum they were studying. It was demoralising for all involved.

“We worked with study programmes because that was funding related, but the outcomes didn’t match our learners,” Greenhalgh says. “They would come out with something that was classed as a fail when, actually, they might have made loads of progress. The standardised measures don’t fit our learners and it was in danger of making them look like they weren’t progressing when actually they were.”

But what else could she offer them? Usually, colleges tend to opt for evolution over revolution - small changes are easier to roll out and track. There were a few options in that category that Greenhalgh could have chosen. But she did something different: she ripped up the rule book completely.

Greenhalgh is head of post-16 and lead for special educational needs and disability (SEND) at Inclusion Hampshire, a specialist education provider for those with EHCPs. Whether they’ve been referred by a mainstream school, Hampshire council SEND, or have attended a pre-16 alternative provision, these teenagers have one thing in common: they’re all too vulnerable to attend mainstream college.

Giving them exactly the same curriculum as a mainstream college seemed, to Greenhalgh, to be nonsensical for the reasons outlined above. To find something different, she did not look to research but to the extensive experience of her staff - the turnover at Inclusion Hampshire is very low - and to the learners themselves: what were the skills they really wanted to master? What were the things they really want to learn about?

The responses prompted a complete change in approach. The curriculum offer now focuses on social skills, communication, work skills, functional skills, counselling and enrichment activities.

“[What was clear was that] we’ve got such individual learners and one measure doesn’t fit all,” says Greenhalgh, “so we stopped working with the provider to do study programmes and we started working with Hampshire SEND, so that our learners are directly referred, monitored and funded by them. That means we work really closely with each student. We have a lot more freedom to set the outcomes with the learner, the parent and the SEND department, rather than adhering to a more standard outcome.

“They might not be meeting what you’d expect for Year 13, but that’s not relevant to them and we wanted to really measure the positive progress in all aspects.”

In social skills, students could be learning about anything from what an unhealthy relationship looks like to knife crime. In work skills, they could learn about how to communicate in different ways or how to resolve situations with colleagues and bosses.

Some of the modules are taken from the exam body OCR’s life and living skills qualification - for example, the world of work module - which means they are accredited. The other modules are built from teachers’ experience and student feedback.

The way the day is structured around this new curriculum needed to change, too. A lot of the learners have anxiety and need a high level of structure.

So, instead of teaching in subject blocks, Inclusion Hampshire teaches one lesson per day. Each day has a dedicated teacher and a dedicated subject: Monday is world of work, Tuesday life, living and social skills, Thursday is academic study - those who are capable work towards a functional skills qualification, Friday is dedicated to one-on-one counselling, with one-on-one music sessions afterwards.

Students are carefully selected for the Thursday session. “[They do] functional skills maths and English up to level 2, and for some who are GCSE capable, we can prepare them for that,” says Greenhalgh.

“If they are academically capable to do the GCSEs in maths and English, we support that and find them somewhere to sit the exams, as we are a functional skill exam centre only at the moment.”

She reviews the curriculum after every term - and is quite flexible with it. If a need has been identified the previous term, it gets embedded. If another element is deemed irrelevant, it’s removed. Feedback is constantly sought from the learners.

The learning is structured according to the EHCP of each student. This means every student is, in effect, on a different learning journey. “Each student has long-term targets taken from their EHCP, short-term targets to break down the progress towards that long-term goal, and then we have a detailed support needs and strategies plan,” says Greenhalgh.

An example of the latter might be a pupil being able to work in pencil because she’s a perfectionist and not being able to amend errors causes huge anxiety. “It’s right down to that level of detail,” says Greenhalgh.

She explains that these documents are seen as fluid and can be adapted and changed as the student goes through the college.

She offers a couple of case studies to demonstrate how this works in practice:

The short-term targets and strategies are formed from collaborative work between students and staff, so everyone has a clear idea of the target and how to get there.

It sounds like a very collaborative but complex model. Yet Greenhalgh says she has had no staff issues with implementation.

“We’re a small organisation with staff who tend to stay for quite a long time,” she says, explaining that this means everyone was on the same page in wanting this to work and making it happen.

Parents, too, have bought into the shift in approach. Inclusion Hampshire is very upfront about the education students can expect to receive. Parents and students have several meetings with staff before they start - the way the curriculum works is explained from the beginning. Greenhalgh says that, for many, these conversations are relief: they realise that mainstream education is not the only option, that they can engage with education with that additional support.

The barriers that have cropped up will be familiar to any specialist provider and are unrelated to the shift in curriculum: for example, transport is always tricky. She has learners who cannot get on to trains, but they constantly work towards independent travel.

Is it working? Greenhalgh says success is measured by positive transition and destinations. To go from having a mass of support to nothing can be hugely detrimental, says Greenhalgh, so students are encouraged to keep in touch - and most do. Some even aim to work at the college one day.

In the 2019 cohort, there were 14 students. Nine of them are continuing into their second year at Inclusion Hampshire, two are going on to mainstream college, one is going to apprenticeship in construction and another has moved on to a residential therapeutic college.

To Greenhalgh, that looks like success. She just wishes more bespoke options were available to vulnerable learners across the country. “It’s really important to respond to the needs you identify in your learners,” she says. “And to make sure your teaching is relevant and flexible. One measure does not fit all”

Kate Parker is FE reporter at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 4 OCTOBER 2019 issue under the headline “Why we ripped up the curriculum rule book”