Tag Archives: Scottish education system

Education and youth work: collaborating to close the attainment gap

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by Scott Faulds

At this year’s Scottish Learning Festival, there was a large selection of seminars offered which allowed delegates to gain knowledge of good practice from across the Scottish education sector. One seminar of particular interest was run by YouthLink Scotland, the national agency for youth work, who discussed their youth work and skills partnership programme, which is designed to help close the attainment gap. This programme is funded by the Scottish Government via the Scottish Attainment Challenge and Pupil Equity Funding.

Collaboration

YouthLink Scotland believe that the key to tackling the attainment gap is through strengthening the collaboration between the youth work sector and formal education, via a focus on reducing the impact of poverty on attainment. A key element of fostering this collaboration is through a development of mutual trust and respect. Understanding and respecting different pedagogy, roles and approaches enables youth workers and educators to work together to help young people overcome barriers to learning.

Establishing relationships

It is important to recognise that teachers and youth workers establish different types of relationships with young people. For example, youth workers have a dedicated focus on young people, specialise in personal, social and educational development and are inclusive without being based on a singular interest, skill or capacity. The different relationship developed by youth workers can be useful when interacting with young people who are almost at the point of refusing school and may not feel comfortable speaking to their teachers. The effects of youth work interventions can be profound, with YouthLink Scotland finding that successful interventions have led to improvements in attendance, engagement, attainment, health and wellbeing and school leaver destinations.

Youth workers are able to complement and enhance the formal curriculum by delivering tailored interventions, planned in partnership with teachers, that will help to provide a variety of alternative learning options to vulnerable young people. These interventions can help reintegrate students to the classroom setting and provide them with opportunities to gain youth work awards that recognise wider achievements. Additionally, youth workers are able to contribute to school improvement planning, self-evaluation and help measure the impact of youth work interventions. The involvement of youth workers in these processes allows for the development of evidence of what works and can be used to increase understanding of youth work and how it can support the formal education sector.

Good practice: The Hub, St Stephen’s High, Port Glasgow

An example of a successful collaboration between youth work and the formal education sector is the development of The Hub at St Stephen’s High, Port Glasgow, where 80% of pupils are within the first to third deciles of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.

The Hub is a nurturing environment that pupils can be referred to by principal teachers of Guidance and other members of the senior management team. It is important to note that The Hub should not be considered an internal exclusion base, rather, it is a space that facilitates short term interventions with a focus on the pupil returning to the classroom environment. The main focus of The Hub is to improve the attainment of disengaged groups of pupils, with intervention from teachers, classroom assistants, youth workers and other third sector organisations such as Barnardo’s.

The Hub offers a streamlined approach to providing support to disengaged pupils, with the level and type of support tailored to the needs of each pupil. This can include operating activities outside of the formal school setting, and the collaboration with youth workers ensures that activities can also be operated outside normal school hours. A representative from St Stephen’s High, spoke highly of The Hub arguing that the ability for disengaged pupils to develop support systems with youth workers was key to their successful reintegration into classroom-based education.

Additionally, the Hub provides services to both the wider school and local community, such as a breakfast club and food bank. The Hub also encourages and develops parental engagement through events such as “parent and carers wellbeing day” and “twilight teas”. These events are becoming increasingly more important to youth workers, as research has shown a link between parental engagement and the attainment gap, especially around periods of transition.

Final thoughts

Tackling Scotland’s poverty-related attainment gap is a long-term challenge that will involve collaboration from groups across the country. The collaboration between youth work and the formal education sector allows for the exchange of pedagogy and approaches that will ultimately allow for the development of better interventions to help vulnerable young people.

It is important to recognise that some young people may not feel comfortable talking to a teacher and therefore the availability of youth workers may allow them to develop alternative relationships which can help them re-join classroom education. Re-engaging young people who are close to refusing school is vital in eradicating the poverty-related attainment gap. All actions to prevent this must be explored.

If you enjoyed this article, take a look at our previous blog on the Scottish Learning Festival, which reflects on Deputy First Minister John Swinney’s keynote.

We have also blogged on a range of topics around education, including on Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in schools. You can read more here.

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What state is the Scottish education system in?

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by Stacey Dingwall

On Tuesday, the Scottish Government published new statistics on the country’s education system, contained in the evidence report for the National Improvement Framework for Scottish Education. The report outlines progress made against each of the four priorities set by the Scottish Government in January when it first published the Framework:

  • Improvement in attainment, particularly in literacy and numeracy;
  • Closing the attainment gap between the most and least disadvantaged children;
  • Improvement in children and young people’s health and wellbeing;
  • Improvement in employability skills and sustained, positive school leaver destinations for all young people.

The government’s priority

The Scottish Government has previously identified education as its top priority, with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon stating that her actions in this area are what she wishes to be judged on during her time in office.

Unfortunately, these latest statistics did not bring good news for the First Minister. While Education Secretary John Swinney highlighted that the number of teachers in the country had increased overall, he also conceded that “significant improvements” were needed in some areas. These areas include a worsening of the ratio of pupils to teachers in 12 council areas, and a slight increase in class sizes overall.

2015 Pisa results

The progress report came on the heels of the previous week’s bad news: Scotland’s performance in the 2015 Pisa rankings. The country recorded its worst ever results in the OECD survey, with scores for maths, science and reading declining since 2012. Scotland’s 2015 results in these areas were all classified as ‘average’, in contrast to 2000’s results of ‘above average’.

Although Scotland maintained its position within the OECD statistical average, the results indicate that the country is now performing ‘significantly below’ other countries in some areas, including England (science).

Has the Scottish education system got worse?

Reacting to the Pisa results, opposition parties called them evidence of “a decade of educational failure” under the SNP. Keir Bloomer of Reform Scotland and the Commission on School Reform also said that it was “no longer credible to describe Scotland’s education system as world leading”, and suggested there was now an “urgent” case for reform.

This is not something that the Scottish Government has shied away from admitting. As we reported from this year’s Scottish Learning Festival, John Swinney has made it his intention to “declutter’ the Scottish education system, by reducing teachers’ workloads around assessments. A number of actions have either been implemented, or are in the process of being introduced, in response to the OECD’s 2015 review of education policy, practice and leadership in Scotland, which the government commissioned itself. These include the expansion of the Scottish Attainment Challenge, funding from which enabled 63% of the increase in FTE teachers in Scotland last year.

Pisa overemphasis?

Larry Flanagan, general secretary of EIS, Scotland’s largest teaching union, said that it was important not to make any “snap judgements” based on the Pisa results, emphasising the need for analysis of the full data released by the OECD rather than headline findings.

We looked at issues raised around the influence of Pisa results in 2014, when academics and research questioned the system’s reliability and its claim that when schools are given more independence over spending, their schools achieve better academic results. An evaluation of the Pisa methodology published in May this year found that it had a series of limitations including “an inconsistent rationale, opaque sampling, unstable evaluative design, measuring instruments of questionable validity, opportunistic use of scores transformed by standardization, reverential confidence in statistical significance, an absence of substantively significant statistics centered on the magnitudes of effects, a problematic presentation of findings and questionable implications drawn from the findings for educational norms and practice”.

The OECD itself has admitted that “large variation in single country ranking positions is likely” because of the methods it uses.

Going forward

Conceding that the results were not where she wanted Scotland’s education system to be, Nicola Sturgeon maintained, however that the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) is the “right way forward”. She also highlighted her government’s commitment to acting on the recommendations contained in the OECD’s earlier review of the system, in which the CfE was described in positive terms, with the caveat that the government must be ‘bold and innovative’ in order to achieve its potential. Given the First Minister’s stated determination to improve the education system’s performance, this is advice that would seem logical to follow.

Follow us on Twitter to see what developments in public and social policy are interesting our research team. If you found this article interesting, you may also like to read our other education articles.