3. Re-Thinking Student Support

3.1 If advances in the curriculum are important in meeting students’ needs, then continuous review of student support systems, and implementation of necessary changes, is possibly even more so. There is a strong commitment locally to education and, in general, to ‘decent’ social values, but we are not immune to anti-social and criminal activities that can devastate communities and their young. We also have the full range of social, emotional and behavioural needs accommodated within the school plus the ‘teenagers being teenagers’ factor. All combine to create challenging dynamics within the school!

3.2 Support systems and centres

3.2.1 There is a very strong commitment to meeting identified needs through Guidance and Learning Support. In Guidance, we moved from a horizontal to a vertical structure this year. To emphasise the team aspect of support work we created a pastoral base large enough to accommodate all confidential files, created workstations for each teacher and provided an area to host Guidance/Year Head meetings that take place every morning from 8.30 a.m. Students can seek the support of their Guidance teacher there and other teachers may meet the Guidance staff on any matter involving support for students.

3.2.2 From August 2004 we intend to amalgamate Support for Learning and Guidance into a Student Support department. This new system will give each support teacher an advocacy role about all the learning, pastoral and behaviour support needs of their particular caseload students. A generic student support suite will, three years on, enable staff to support students with everything from a UCAS form to booking in to anger management sessions.

"Organising Guidance, Behaviour and Support for Learning as a team gives an integrated approach to providing for the needs of students. It enables the team members to share their expertise and reduce the duplication of activities such as primary school liaison. It provides a holistic way to support individuals".
Support for Learning Teacher

3.2.3 Our support unit for students with social, emotional and behavioural needs has been very successful over the years in working with youngsters and their families who have pervasive difficulties in coping with life. This success encouraged us to extend its operation to cover students whose behaviour elicits less sympathy from staff, the ‘naughty’, ‘badly behaved’ or ‘downright disruptive’ students. However, this change made it difficult to develop a shared environment appropriate for these different scenarios and we are currently reviewing it. Safe and supportive contexts for all our students are vital.

3.2.4 The support unit’s collaboration with the Crannog youth-work organisation has been very successful in working with students who might otherwise have been placed in residential schools. Crannog works in an off-site setting initially. Its care and intensive support have successfully turned around student after student at a critical juncture, returning them successfully to school through the support unit - a substantial achievement.

"The Crannog service has proved invaluable in allowing dedicated programmes to be implemented for some of our most vulnerable and challenging students".
Support Unit Teacher

"Knowing you can rely on a school that is consistent, fair… makes our work at The Aberlour Child Care Trust Crannog Project so much easier and rewarding. We are confident that positive outcomes are achieved because we have shared goals with a school that takes that extra step to ensure that young people are included whenever possible".
Member of Crannog Project

"Crannog has helped me settle down and get back to school and helped me be a nicer person".
S2 Student

3.2.5 An Authority initiated cross-service project in Wigtownshire supports students who are vulnerable through substance misuse, either through their own habits or indirectly through the behaviour of others upon whom the students are financially, emotionally or socially dependant. The project, ChYPSS (Children and Young People’s Substances Service) comprises a project leader, a teacher, a youth worker and a health worker, working together in an integrated holistic way. The project room is in the heart of the school, with youngsters attending on a drop-in or referral basis. ChYPSS also works with staff - especially guidance and behaviour support staff - and reports directly to the School Board. Its contribution to student well-being has been immense.

3.3 Creative responses: human, organisational and technological

3.3.1 Children and their development are not reducible to systems or a list of pre-set outcomes. We seek imaginative and creative responses to our most challenging situations. When a student with Asperger’s Syndrome joined us in 2000 her unpredictable - to us, then - and sometimes violent behaviour resulted in a series of exclusions. Exclusion did not resolve the situation for staff, the student missed out on education and life was extremely stressful for her family. Throughout, our student’s mother remained resilient and insightful. In our desperation to support the student and safeguard staff, we took the unusual decision of offering the mother a job as a classroom assistant to support her daughter. We were, of course, mindful of the risks and were prepared to rethink this approach should it appear that the experiment was adversely affecting the mother-daughter relationship or increasing dependence in an unhelpful way. We need not have worried. The improvement was immediate and has been sustained, the student needing diminishing support as she and the school have adapted and developed. This month she sat Standard Grades and will remain with us for at least another year. Her mother - our classroom assistant - will, hopefully, remain much longer!

3.3.2 On a broader behaviour front we had found that most serious anti social incidents tended to occur outwith the classroom at break-times. For some years we have been reshaping the schedule of the school day. Lunchtime has been reduced to 40 minutes – which makes it just too tight for students to go down town and make mischief in the local shops. Staff – there were 40 volunteers for the roster – are present in the Mall building at lunchtimes, not as ‘police’, but as supportive and conversational adults who model more mature ways of filling in free time. We also removed the need for an afternoon interval. Within the lunchtime itself we arranged a daily football competition for S4 students refereed by a janitor and attracting 40 to 50 spectators among the student population. This has had a significant positive effect, reducing litter, vandalism and bullying.

"Since lunchtime football has been introduced attitudes and co-operation of the students around the school have improved tremendously".
Janitor

3.3.3 To help monitor and track student attendance, behaviour and academic progress, we introduced in session 2002/2003 Bromcom - a portable wireless data collecting system. Every teacher in the school has his/her own Bromcom into which he/she can enter classroom attendance period by period, as well as giving information regarding behaviour and progress. Whole school data is available by 9.20 a.m. enabling secretarial staff to phone the families of absent students. As a result, unauthorised absences went down and responses to behaviour issues became more prompt and effective, with further progress certain this session. This, combined with Cognitive Assessment Testing conducted in September of S1 and a profiling system that benchmarks potential and individually tracks our students’ progress through their career at Stranraer Academy, has improved the quality of our discussions, interviews and reports for students, parents and teachers.

"In this very large campus, Bromcom has speeded-up communication to such an extent that student referrals are dealt with and feedback given to individual teachers within 24 hours. This has impacted considerably on whole school ethos".
Senior Manager

3.3.4 We place great emphasis on classroom teaching and learning. Over the last two years we have invested heavily in interactive electronic whiteboards and related software programmes (See Picture F). Our first venture was to purchase Maths Alive - an electronic Maths syllabus - for all ten Maths classrooms. A computer-literate staff member is designated to carry out staff development across the school. The whiteboards are now in most departments - we hope to have complete cover by August 2005. By then every teacher will also have his/her own laptop for administrative and curricular purposes. For many teachers this brought a whole new dimension to their teaching, especially when linked to the Internet. The emergence of on-line lessons is just around the corner! This week Stranraer Academy became the first Scottish school to receive the ‘Excellence in Education Award’ from RM, a UK-based educational IT company.

"Maths Alive is a vast and powerful resource that provides ways of adding both depth and fun to lessons. It offers both students and teachers an alternative to text books and worksheets!".
Mathematics Teacher

"At first I was afraid, I was petrified . . . my reactions when confronted with the news that I was expected to use IT skills in the classroom; me? with no IT skills and barely able to log on/off without assistance? How would I cope? One year on and I would fight to the death to keep my laptop. These new skills have re-introduced an element of fun into my classroom and made teaching enjoyable again".
Teacher of Social Subjects

"I think Whiteboards have been very helpful especially in Maths when we are able to play games which are fun yet help me to learn the Maths and understand it better".
S1 Student

3.3.5 Computer technology has been successful in supporting youngsters of all abilities with written communication difficulties. Our Support for Learning department initiated the purchase of voice recognition computer systems that translate oral dictation into text (See Picture G). Not only do they allow the student to express his/her ideas in writing, saving a great deal of time in the process, but they also present his/her work in a way in which the ‘writer’ can take pride.

"As a newcomer to using speech recognition software I have found Dragon to be incredibly useful for all my work. I will certainly use this package in years to come".
Support for Learning Teacher

4. Conclusion

4.1 Our Case Study gives a sample of the innovations we have undertaken over the last few years to improve the education for all our pupils. It would be great to give an unqualified report of positive progress across the school, perhaps that every student had achieved his/her full potential and that all support needs were being fully met! Would that it were so, but we are not there yet. Certainly the last four years have seen a rise in our attainment at all levels to the point where we are now meeting and exceeding our targets - but there is room for more improvement. Our exclusion figures have oscillated over the past four years and earlier signs of real improvement have been offset by a rise in the past two years. Attendance figures have, again, improved recently but we are still short of meeting national standards.

4.2 So what of the future?

4.2.1 We intend to develop our theme of an alternative curriculum to make sure that all students have the opportunity to achieve success in line with their abilities and aspirations. We will continue to promote an ethos that fosters respect based on high expectations and recognition of the dignity of each individual. As an apparently small, but actually substantial, contribution to that ethos we expect to introduce ‘cashless catering cards’ in October to eliminate any possible way of identifying students having free school meals. This should avoid the situation of students choosing hunger rather than humiliation.

4.2.2 Tracking and target setting will also be improved as we make even greater use of technology to record a student’s ongoing academic progress and begin to link this information directly to the home on-line. We will have interactive whiteboards in every classroom and will also be able to provide homework and lessons on-line. We are determined to develop an ‘Assessments for Learning’ policy and to initiate school research into the underachievement of boys. These developments will be co-ordinated by the new post of Principal Teacher (Raising Attainment) which we hope to appoint next month.

4.2.3 We intend to implement a robust alternative-to-exclusion policy in order to cut back on the educational and social waste created by debarring the most vulnerable youngsters from the very process which can keep them in touch with a productive future within their own community.

4.2.4 And after that we will continue with further developments in an effort to meet the wider needs of even more students, both individually and collectively.