Issue - meetings

Report of the Statutory Scrutiny Officer

Nick Lee, Director of Education, Liz Anderson, Priority Education Investment Area (PEIA) Education Consultant, and Samina Ring, PEIA Project Lead presented a report on the work of the local PEIA programme. The following points were raised:

a)  Nottingham was named one of 24 PEIAs and is receiving funding to support work around three key areas: writing at Key Stage 2, reading across all ages and school attendance. Funding from the Department for Education runs through to March 2025. At the start of the project, a Partnership Board was established with representatives from the Council, many of the Academy Trusts established in the city and the local universities. Discussions have already started about the sustainably of the Partnership Board beyond March 2025 and Nottingham Trent University, as the existing Chair, has confirmed it is happy to continue hosting, ensuring better cohesion moving beyond the life of the programme.

b)  The Programme is now about halfway through, and attendance is improving faster than the national average at both primary and secondary level, and primary levels are now in line with the national average. Children who have an attendance between 40% and 70% are considered to be persistently absent. There are still a significant number of children within this cohort and there has been less impact on this number than on the cohort with higher overall attendance.

c)  As part of the work, the language used was altered to articulate the number of days’ absence, rather than as a percentage. This allowed families and children to more easily understand the impact of their absence. A focus has also been to ensure a good start to the term, and not missing days at the start of the school year so that they do not remain in the persistent absent cohort for the rest of the year. Rather than highlighting schools with lower attendance, the programme is looking at data on a ward basis, identifying that attendance has been lowest in Bulwell, Aspley, Clifton East and Bestwood. Schools within these areas were targeted first for support and, over the Autumn and Spring terms, overall attendance improved.

d)  The launch event had attendance form 95% of Academy Trusts, and a recent meeting of Designated Safeguarding Leads had the highest turnout since the Coronavirus pandemic. A network event took place in May which saw 150 attendees, so it is clear that across the city enthusiasm and passion for this programme remains high. A focus on safeguarding and seeing attendance as a big part of safeguarding has moved to make this a wider responsibility and, of those who joined the network event in May, around 78 schools now have funded access to specialist resources around improving attendance.

e)  A total of 388 cases have been triaged by the PEIA team in both primary and secondary schools across the city, with 249 being accepted – mostly where other services were not involved with the family already. Where other services such as Social Workers and Family Support Workers were  ...  view the full minutes text for item 7