Against a background of the misuse of Pupil Equity Fund cash - one local authority spent theirs on campus cops, while another used it to fund swimming lessons - the purchase of a GPS watch using Attainment Challenge money, aimed at looked-after children, might at first sight raise eyebrows.

The GPS watch, a device that can tell you the time but also where you are, could, on the face of it, seem like a frivolous purchase: someone abusing the system to get hold of a free Fitbit.

But this is why context is so important, says Linda O’Neill, the education lead at the Centre for Excellence for Children’s Care and Protection, based at the University of Strathclyde. That watch was bought for a looked-after primary pupil who was so nervous about travelling independently that they didn’t want to walk to school on their own or socialise with friends in the evening. The hope is that the watch will get them out and about. If it does that, it will be money well spent.

First minister Nicola Sturgeon announced in 2018 that an additional £1,200 would be made available to councils for each looked-after child in the authority. So what else is this money - which this school year amounted to £12 million - being spent on?

Virtual sanity

According to the Scottish government, the Care Experienced Children and Young People Fund has also been spent on mentoring, counselling and even driving lessons. And now many Scottish councils are introducing a new role to ensure that someone is coordinating the activities and interventions (and smartwatches) the new money pays for - that of virtual headteacher.

Virtual heads do not lead brick-and-mortar schools. Rather, they are responsible for all the looked-after children in a local authority and, although they don’t see them day-to-day, they do the things a headteacher would do. They track and monitor their pupils’ attainment, attendance and exclusions; if these figures need improving, they intervene to make a difference.

Now, Education Scotland estimates that around half of Scottish local authorities employ a virtual head, although not all the new recruits are called that - something some say could be a mistake.

Before the new fund was introduced, there was only one virtual headteacher in Scotland: Aberdeen City Council’s Larissa Gordon, who was appointed in December 2015. She has now - along with O’Neill - set up a network for the new arrivals so that they can come together and support each other, but there is also a wealth of experience south of the border to draw on.

Virtual headteachers became statutory for local authorities in England with the passage of the Children and Families Act 2014 and every council has a virtual head who manages the additional £2,300 per looked-after child made available to English councils as part of the pupil premium, the English version of PEF that has existed since 2011.

Gordon describes her role as “coordinator and partnership broker”, as well as being a clear point of contact for anyone who wants to discuss looked-after children and education in Aberdeen. She acts as a bridge between school and social work but also as a link between schools and the organisations that can help looked-after children who are struggling get back into education.

In Aberdeen, one of the key partnerships Gordon has cultivated is with Sport Aberdeen, the charity that runs the city’s leisure facilities and now provides free passes for looked-after children and their carers, as well as helping schools to deliver alternative timetables.

One boy moved on from being excluded multiple times from his secondary to popping in for cups of tea with his headteacher. The key? To everyone’s surprise, it was horse riding. He fell in love with the sport, which, Gordon says, improved his confidence and his self-esteem and eventually got him re-engaged in school.

“We never thought it would be horse riding but it was,” says Gordon.

Now she is looking to achieve similar results with creative arts activities, acknowledging that sport is not for everyone.

Schools might say that they already track and monitor and have high aspirations for their pupils, but Gordon sees her role as getting them to understand the fact that looked-after children need an additional layer of support and scrutiny.

“It’s about why looked-after children or care-experienced children need that championing,” she says. “I always talk about ‘our children’, and even that language gets people to think about what it means to be a corporate parent.”

Some authorities that have recently introduced the role in Scotland have omitted the word “headteacher” from the job title in favour of titles such as “looked-after children lead”, “education officer” or “principal teacher”, but this could prove to be an error, Gordon believes. Having “headteacher” in the title is important, she argues, because sometimes virtual heads have to challenge traditional heads, and it helps to do that on an equal footing. It also makes the role easier to understand for children and families.

An evaluation of the 11 virtual head pilots that ran in England for two years from 2007 found that the status of “headteacher” was important and that the influence of the virtual school head “depended to a large extent on the extent to which they were accepted as peers by other school heads” - although that research also showed that children were “rather perplexed by the job title”.

“It’s about how colleagues in schools see them. I don’t instruct headteachers, but there is support and challenge,” Gordon says.

“The other part is it helps parents and carers to understand the role and, when you meet children and young people, you can have a conversation about what a headteacher does, and that makes it easier for them to understand.”

‘Just a data-collection exercise’

Sometimes, Gordon has created presentations for key members of school staff about individual children so that they can understand their journey: all the upheaval and trauma they may have faced in their young lives. Once she did this in a bid to persuade a secondary school that a child needed an “enhanced” transition from primary school. At the next meeting, “the energy was very different”, she says.

“They got a proper sense of the child and what his needs were. There was a real can-do attitude and he had a fantastic transition, but that could have looked very different.”

According to The Virtual School Handbook, created for virtual heads in England, “perhaps the single most important thing that a VSH can do” is to “stimulate a professional dialogue with headteachers about the reasons why children and young people behave as they do”. It adds: “This can, in turn, raise awareness of the physiological and psychological effects of early abuse, trauma and loss, on attachment and resilience, in particular, and through them relationships with peers and adults.”

When Gordon was getting to grips with the job, she turned to a virtual head in Kent for help. There is a lot that Scotland can learn from England, O’Neill believes.

In some cases, this will be about learning from the mistakes, as well as the successes, given that the role is not without its critics.

Writing recently for Tes, Mike Parker, then director of Schools North East, a network of headteachers in England, said one weakness of virtual heads was that many had other roles in the local authority but no experience of senior school leadership roles.

There was the feeling in some areas, he said, that virtual heads were “just a data-collection exercise on looked-after children for the DfE [Department for Education]” and “unwilling to get directly involved in the welfare of looked-after children”.

Jancis Andrew - the virtual school head for Leeds City Council and the chair of the National Association of Virtual School Heads - roundly dismisses these comments, saying virtual heads are “passionate and committed”.

“You could hardly get further from a data crunching exercise than the job virtual heads do,” says Andrew who has been a virtual head for six years and is currently responsible for 1,340 children.

The key to the job for her is bringing expertise in education to the world of social care, and bringing knowledge about the “lived experiences” of looked-after children and their families into the world of schools.

Tes has also reported that English headteachers in some areas were at loggerheads with virtual heads over whether their school should have to accept particular pupils, although this is not necessarily a bad thing: such arguments stem from the fact that someone is advocating for a child.

When giving an example of where virtual school heads can make a difference, O’Neill talks about children who, when they move to a different part of Scotland - usually because of a shortage of foster carers locally - find themselves locked out of education.

She says this can happen if, for example, a looked-after child is receiving 10 hours of classroom assistant time in their current school but the school they want to enrol in cannot offer that; the upshot can be that the school refuses to admit the child.

“The policy and legislation says that should not happen, but it does and needs are not met,” says O’Neill. “Virtual headteachers are advocates for the child - they are like a dog with a bone, and if the child is not enrolled at 10am on Monday morning, they want to know why. They are the one person whose remit involves these children and their education, rather than it being a small part of a wider remit.”

Before this year, Gordon had responsibility for around 460 looked-after children, but that has risen to more than 500 because - at her behest - children in the early years have been added to her remit.

Another challenge is that, because the local authority struggles to recruit foster carers, more than half her children are looked after outside Aberdeen. As such, they do not end up on the rolls of the schools where she and her team have worked hard to upskill staff and build relationships and partnerships. As Gordon puts it: “The high number of children and young people who live outwith the authority poses challenges in ensuring equity of provision.”

She is therefore in danger of falling victim - when trying to advocate for her children in other authorities - to the kind of problems she heard existed in Aberdeen before the virtual school was established in 2015. Back then, she says, it was not clear who to contact with a concern about a child’s education.

You can see why, for Gordon and the other emerging virtual heads, it would make sense if every council in Scotland had a virtual head.

It would also be welcomed by virtual heads in England. Although based in Leeds, Andrew currently has nine children she is responsible for living in Scotland because their safety would be at risk if they lived locally. If Andrew has a child move to another English local authority, she points out that she has 149 colleagues “who do the same job as me” whom she can pick up the phone to and liaise with.

“Having that network makes it better for the young people,” she says.

And that’s surely the point. Doesn’t every child in every authority deserve to have someone who is “like a dog with a bone” when it comes to getting the best for them?

Emma Seith is a reporter at Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

This article originally appeared in the 13 March 2020 issue under the headline “Virtual heads, real issues”