SUPPORTING OUR
ARMEDFORCES CHILDREN
IN SCHOOLS
The Armed Forces Covenant works in so many ways to support our personnel and families, all aimed at ensuring the military community receives fair treatment whilst being posted to new locations. One example is how the covenant supports service children in schools and the RAF Families Federation paid avisit to Wittering Primary School to find out just how they manage it –and with good results.
Twofrequent asks that come into the Federation for education-related advice is the allocation of school places for sons and daughters coming into areas on anew posting. The other is around Service Pupil Premium (SPP) and how, practically that should work at school level and how the £300 per service child should be spent.
Wittering Primary School provides state education to some 330 children -two thirds of whom are service children. Acohort of the staff grew up as service children themselves and so have lived the experience and feel can empathise with the memories of deployments, separation and frequent family moves to different areas and the whole new friend-making process that ensues. All of which some children thrive on and others not so.
Each local authority (LA) has adifferent school admissions process. Some are online, some are hard copy only and others are also only ‘manned’ during school term time. This, coupled with occasionally delayed Admin Orders (AO) to confirm postings can cause the process to become quite cumbersome and stressful. SFAcannot be allocated until the AO is given and LAs can’t accept an application before ahome address is given so whilst that all sounds pretty straight forward, it can actually hold things up at various points and can result in avery short ‘move-in’ window which is very unsettling for the family.
To add to this, there is also often adelay in the Common Transfer File (CTF) which is used by schools and LAs to send pupil data from one school to another,ironically set in place to enable asmooth handover between schools. Wittering Primary School has worked with Peterborough LA and added its own mutually agreed internal process to join up the dots with the aim of inducting, integrating and settling in children from day one.
ENVOY
SPRING 2019
raf-ff.org.uk
Wittering Headmaster,MrRhys Thrower adds:
“It’s tricky on postings as personnel don’t always get their new SFAaddresses straight away and that can hugely hinder the school allocation process. We always like to talk to each family moving into area and advise on solutions depending on their situation.
“Wehave agood working relationship with our LA in Peterborough and in addition to their process, we also do an in-house assessment (although it’s not as formal as it sounds) for absolutely all of our children, whether service children or those from the local
community.Itgives us an immediate picture of any emotional needs that we need to be aware of as well as what stages in the curriculum they are at (some schools do different parts of the curriculum at different stages of the school year so it’s not always about capability). We can then map in any ‘catch-up’ sessions that may be needed. We also work to abuddy system together with issuing a settling-in book which has notes in of their new friends, where to go for various events at school, thoughts and reflections. The book is kept in school for the first week and then goes home for families to see.”
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FEDERATION SUPPORTINGOURARMED FORCES CHILDREN IN SCHOOLS
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