THE SITUATION AND CONTEXT
I work in a larger than average Primary school in the West Midlands. It has 584 pupils on roll, with 20% designated as having SEN (school action/statement), 21% of pupils having English as an Additional Language (EAL) and 24% of pupils eligible for free school meals. As part of the school’s Pupil Premium spending from 2012-2013 the school have opted to secure the services of clinical psychology and educational psychology support from a UK wide provider of evidence-based psychological expertise.
This initiative has seen the embedding of one clinical psychologist and one educational psychologist within the school, providing full day support on a weekly basis.As well as interventions with a focus on developing relationships between the school and parents, and various aspects of staff development through the delivery of targeted training sessions, one of the strands of work which CPA’s psychologists have been heavily involved with has been a targeted programme of support for a number of pupils in Key Stage 1 who were presenting with significant social, emotional and behavioural difficulties within the school environment.
Supporting Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties in Key Stage 1
As a school we identified a group of pupils in Key Stage 1 who it was felt were struggling with the social demands of life in school. In total, six pupils were referred to the Educational Psychologist for support. The Educational Psychologist offered support by working directly with pupils and by providing regular staff consultation, and developed a programme of support based around Cognitive Behaviour Therapy frameworks. Dr Gary Lavan, Educational Psychologist explains: “One of the key factors in opting for such an approach was the identified need to develop the meta-cognition and self-regulation capacities of the pupils. CBT, or Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, is a talking therapy. It has been proved to help with a wide range of emotional and physical health conditions in adults, young people and children. CBT looks at how we think about a situation and how this affects the way we act. In turn our actions can affect how we think and feel”. Teaching children strategies to motivate themselves and plan, monitor and evaluate their own behaviour is a well-proven, high-impact approach (Oxford School Improvement, 2012).
The model of support created by Inclusion manager, Sarah Kennedy, sees psychologists being embedded as part of the school team – based at the school on the same day every week. This has helped to facilitate a collaborative approach with staff at the school and has enabled the psychologists to regularly meet with teachers and support staff to discuss on-going issues, and to jointly develop profiles to help teachers develop targeted interventions for each pupil. Through direct work and by using self-report questionnaires, the psychologist has also effectively sought to incorporate pupil and parental voice into formulating strategies and developing proactive plans to help the children move forward. The Educational Psychologist also conducted a number of classroom and playground observations to provide a further source of information regarding the behaviour of the young people in various environments.
The direct work with staff consisted largely of staff consultation, where the Educational Psychologist (EP) was able to support staff in gaining a greater understanding of presenting difficulties and needs for the children in the group, and to inform class-based interventions and strategies. Additionally, the psychologists have boosted the schools capacity to make referrals to our in-house therapies, such as our CBT therapist or Nurture staff. Inclusion Manager Sarah Kennedy notes that “as a direct result of having the psychologists on site on a weekly basis, our in-house CBT therapist’s role has grown exponentially over the last academic year. Seeing it go from just one hour per week to a full time role with a full caseload. Our CBT therapist has formal, regular supervision provided by the CPA Clinical Psychologist and other less formal input on a weekly basis, all of which ensures her own best practice and self-care as a therapist”.
The school are keen to develop robust evidence-based interventions, and refer to tools like the Sutton Trust Toolkit. The toolkit is a useful tool for developing the ‘behind the scenes’ evidence of intervention work and for evidencing effective Pupil Premium expenditure. Sutton Trust recognises that meta-cognition approaches, such as CBT, which help pupils to manage their own behaviour have one of the highest rates of average impact with a score of +8 months. They describe such interventions as“high impact for low cost, based on extensive evidence”.
The direct work with young people themselves took a number of strands, and involved everything from the EP working in situ, small CBT group focus work, undertaking observations, and other withdrawal from class to include assessment work in groups or individually.
MEASURING IMPACT
Measuring the outcomes of support and intervention is of central importance to the school and the psychologists have helped to develop pre- and post- measures relating to the intervention work with the Key Stage 1 children and staff.
Under the guidance of the psychologists, class staff complete the Boxall Profile for each pupil at two points in time. These profiles give us accurate pre- and post-analysis which is now used for developing the school’s capacity for monitoring progress and change. The Boxall Profile provides a useful evidence-informed framework to help in the assessment process as well as providing practical strategies to support intervention with children struggling to cope in school who have social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. It is a quick and easy two-part checklist, which is completed by members of staff who best know the child. The profile consists of two sections – the Developmental Strand (which measures aspects of development in the pre-school years) and the Diagnostic Profile (which consists of items describing behaviours that inhibit or interfere with the child’s satisfactory involvement in school).
According to the teachers that knew the pupils best, initial Boxall Profiles indicated that they considered the pupils to present with a range of significant developmental delays and considerable behaviours inhibiting successful engagement and involvement in school. Importantly however, over the period of one term, teachers indicated that the pupils had made substantial progress, demonstrating greater development and fewer behaviours inhibiting progress in school.
CONCLUSION/OUTCOME
The school have developed their own Nurture Suite to help the children within the group, as well as other children from Key Stage 1 who were presenting with similar difficulties within school. “The CPA psychologists are heavily embedded in our Nurture work, and we have sought expert advice regarding the analysis of the children, and also best practice regarding phasing the children back into the mainstream classroom” (Sarah Kennedy, Inclusion Manager at Colley Lane). A key focus area for the next two terms has become the re-integration of pupils accessing the Nurture Suite into their main class groups on a full-time basis.
The school’s Nurture practitioners are NGN trained, and with direct management by the Inclusion Manager the school now seamlessly embed both psychological and NGN principles in to the suites very own wave one, quality first teaching.
SUPPORTING QUOTES
“Having the psychologists embedded within the school team has resulted in positive impacts in so many areas: Staff development including training, confidence, understanding, and compassion; fewer incidents particularly at times of transition and non-contact time; Parental engagement; and OFSTED readiness. It has been a really robust and effective expenditure using pupil premium funding” (Sarah Kennedy, Inclusion Manager).
REFERENCES
Oxford School Improvement (2012). The Pupil Premium: Making it work in your school. Oxford University Press.Available online at http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.com/pdf/oxed/primary/pupilpremiumreport.pdf
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