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Working Together for Children

A small scale evaluation of the work of the Manchester Behaviour and Education Support Teams, commissioned by Excellence in Cities

Mel Ainscow and Anne Francis

Centre for Equity in Education

November 2005

Working Together for Children

A small scale evaluation of the work of the Manchester Behaviour and Education Support Teams

Executive Summary

The work of the four Behaviour and Education Support teams (BESTs) in Manchester has provided a splendid opportunity to explore the practicalities of multi-agency working. This report presents the findings of a small scale study, carried out by a team from the Centre for Equity in Education at the University of Manchester, that set out to draw out the lessons of these experiences.

The conclusions of the report are as follows:

1. Whilst the impact of the BESTs has been varied, the evidence is that their work has demonstrated how, working together, colleagues with different professional training, experience and perspectives can provide effective support for vulnerable children. There is also evidence that such interventions can contribute to capacity building within the education system, such that it develops better ways of supporting pupils who are at risk of marginalisation and exclusion.

2. Effective multi-agency practice requires the fostering of new relationships amongst representatives of different support agencies and, indeed, new relations between these groups and senior staff in schools. This points to the importance of forms of leadership (in schools and across the services) that can help to create a common sense of purpose amongst all those involved and a willingness to experiment in order to develop more effective ways of working.

3. The impact of the BESTs was generally most positive within the primary schools, where in many instances the teams were able to contribute to the development of knowledge and skills in schools, and to encourage staff to consistently evaluate and try new approaches. Indeed, many of the primary headteachers in this study believe that the BEST model is a good one for future multi-agency working.

4. It may be that the nature of secondary schools, including their size, organisational complexity and pressure to improve standards in terms of examination results, create particular barriers to the establishment of effective partnerships with outside support agencies. Assuming this to be the case, it points to the need to find ways of addressing these barriers. In this respect, it is encouraging that some promising practices have developed. These approaches seemed to share the following features:

They involved flexible interventions with a strong preventative orientation;

They involved a mix of people and approaches, and drew on a range of agencies, including the voluntary sector;

They involved rapid and flexible action; and

They seem to have been most effective when they involved school staff (teachers and others) as partners.

It should be added that in one of the secondary schools there is also evidence of the growth of what may become more sustainable partnership arrangements with outside agencies as a result of the involvement of the BEST.

5. The teams themselves experienced some difficulties in establishing appropriate working relationships amongst their members. This points to yet further lessons that will need to be taken account of in the future. In particular, they draw attention to the following potential barriers to multi-agency cooperation:

Differences in working cultures and technical language amongst the team members;

Mixed loyalties amongst individuals who retain an involvement in city-wide structures and accountability systems;

Differences of styles of management and leadership between the BESTs and those in the existing services;

Tensions arising from differences of status amongst team members;

Tensions that arise from different conditions of service, e.g. working hours, holiday arrangements, pay scales; and

Changes in personnel, although some argued that these can provide a useful stimulus for reviewing practices.

6. It is encouraging that considerable progress has been made in addressing these difficulties within the teams. Where it occurred, this progress involved the development of relationships that helped those involved to learn how to share individual expertise and, at the same time, create new knowledge and new practices. Once again this points to the importance of forms of leadership that foster the conditions within which successful multi-agency working can occur.

7. The report recommends the following key factors that need to be taken into account in order to create the conditions within which multi-disciplinary ways of working can be encouraged:

Clarity of purpose: It is important that efforts are made to achieve overall clarity of purpose within teams, and between teams and other partners. Here, the perceptions of senior staff in schools are particularly important. At the same time, it is important to help individuals within teams to understand and respect the nature of one another’s expertise and roles.

Protocols: In order to further assist in ensuring clarity of purpose amongst stakeholders it is important to develop procedural protocols. This happened in Manchester but difficulties regarding the referral of students were a particular source of tension and dispute during the early period of the project.

Management and leadership: The growth of what we have called promising practices emerged from processes of collaborative problem solving, within which professional boundaries were gradually softened. All of this demands skilful leadership within the teams in order to encourage a degree of flexibility and risk-taking

Teams: The experience of the BESTs points to certain factors that need to be taken into account when creating teams. Size seems to be a key factor. The BESTs usually had about nine members. This size seemed to facilitate the forms of collaboration and social learning that led to the crossing of professional boundaries and the creation of new responses to challenging circumstances. At the same time, it meant that there were sufficient differences of perspective within the teams to provoke such creativity. Here the decision to appoint to the teams colleagues who had very different life experiences, as well as varied professional training, proved to be very helpful.

Introduction

The BEST initiative, a strand of the Behaviour Improvement Programme in Manchester, has provided interesting opportunities to explore the idea of multi-disciplinary responses to at-risk pupils. This has been timely as the city is now intending to integrate its services for children in response to the Children Act. This being the case, our small-scale study attempts to draw out the lessons of the BEST experience.

Evidence was collected, between July and October, 2005, by analysing relevant documents and through interviews with two of the team leaders, members of the BESTs, key staff in the four secondary schools that were originally targeted for the project, and staff in a sample of 10 primary schools. In addition, discussions were held with a few children and parents.

In this report we summarise our analysis of the evidence we have collected in relation to the following questions:

What strategies have proved to be effective?

What evidence is there of impact?

What are the barriers to the development of multi-disciplinary ways of working?

What has been learnt that can guide the development of future policy and practice within the city?

In so doing, we contrast the views amongst those who have been involved. As we will show, these differences were at times rather striking. This illustrates the way that the particular assumptions, circumstances and interests of individuals can lead them to construct a shared experience in different ways. It leads us to conclude that the successful development of multi-professional ways of working will demand forms of management and leadership (in schools and across the services) that can overcome the barriers to progress that are created through these different stances and perceptions.

Before presenting our findings, we briefly set the BEST initiative in the context of overall national policy development. Then, in the two sections that follow, we summarise separately the information we collected from primary and secondary schools. The balance towards more detail regarding developments in the primary schools reflects what we see as a striking difference in the impact of the initiative between the two sectors. We then summarise the views of team members. In the final part of the report, we set out what we see as the lessons that can be drawn from the whole experience.

The national policy context

When the Labour government was elected in 1997 it pursued a policy of what came to be

called ‘joined-up’ government to further its promise of securing social justice. As part of this policy shift, small-scale multi-agency partnerships were encouraged to work on issues to do with children and young people. The Green Paper (2003) ‘Every Child Matters’ proposed the establishment of Children’s Trusts and it made clear that, in the future, services would be based on a multi-agency, shared accountability approach. A subsequent Paper, ‘Every Child Matters: Next Steps’ (2004), identified that one of the Government’s objectives was to improve children’s life chances, change the odds in their favour and develop structures which would support parents, improve fostering arrangements, provide opportunities for developing activities for young people and create new ways of working for the youth justice system. These reforms were acknowledged to be both wide-ranging and challenging.

It has been suggested that the demands for multi-agency working may reflect the failure of governments to resolve structural problems, particularly in relation to the global economy and the distribution of wealth, which results in problems being passed down the line for those at the grass roots, who have least power in the system to resolve (Clarke and Newman,1997). The Labour Government’s stated purpose is to improve the chances of developing a more just and inclusive society. Unfortunately ‘joined-up’ policies (‘multi-agency’, ‘inter-agency’, ‘strategic partnerships’, etc) have been presented as a construct which has yet to be fully implemented and evaluated against a wide range of appropriate criteria. It increasingly seems the case that the new working practices being developed seem to be about ‘correcting’ some aspect of human behaviour, e.g. reducing teenage pregnancy, reducing school exclusions. This calls into question the extent to which multi-agency approaches are currently being developed and promoted to achieve society’s goals and the extent to which they are designed to serve the perceived needs of individuals and groups of children. The relative weighting that is placed on these two functions and the emphases brought to bear by different agencies indicate a central dilemma for all those involved.

The Behaviour and Education Support Teams (BESTs) have to be seen in the context of this changing policy context. According to the DfES, they were set up to:

….promote emotional well-being, positive mental health, positive behaviour and school attendance among children and young people, and help in the identification and support of those with, or at risk of developing, emotional and behavioural problems, through the provision of multi-agency support in target schools and to individual families.

There was also to be an emphasis on the reduction of youth crime.

BEST started in January 2003 as a strand of the Behaviour Improvement Programme (BIP). In the following September the DfES transferred the managements of all BIPs from Local Authorities to Excellence in Cities. At the outset, it involved four multi-disciplinary teams in working with 19 primary and four secondary schools. These schools were chosen because they served communities where crime, truancy and behaviour were seen to be particular challenges.

The primary schools

The evidence we have collected suggests that, in general, the BESTs have had a bigger impact in primary than in secondary schools. This being the case, we present more detailed accounts of the nature of what has occurred within that sector of the service.

Ten primary school were visited and a range of participants in the project interviewed in person (headteachers, deputy heads, special educational needs coordinators, lead behaviour professionals, parents, pupils, teaching assistants, class teachers and learning mentors). In addition, a telephone interview was held with a further headteacher. At least two schools from each of the four areas covered by the BESTs were included in the sample.

An extremely wide range of views was expressed by headteachers. At one end of the spectrum, BEST was described as ‘the most profoundly positive DfES initiative in which I have ever been involved…… it gave us the edge – we were on top of things. They were brilliant’. On the other hand, another head described it as, ‘amateurish… a complete waste of money…. inadequate… unfocused’.

The primary schools involved with the BESTs faced varied circumstances and difficulties. Many had extremely vulnerable and challenging children, including asylum seekers, refugees and children who experienced domestic violence and gun crime. One school had had 25 exclusions the year before the work with BEST started. Some schools had attendance and punctuality issues. However, another school was not sure why it was in the programme, since their pupils did not include, as a member of staff put it, ‘naughty boys’. Yet another school, inexplicably not included in the initial group of schools, pressurised to join the project and was eventually included.

The impact in some of the primary schools has certainly been profound. In what follows we provide an account of the activities of the teams and an analysis of the factors which made it successful in some schools and less so in others.

Behaviour audits. These were carried out at the start of the project in all the primary schools and for some, particularly those with new heads in challenging schools, it was very timely. The audit, which included lesson observations, provided some schools with very powerful tools for change. As one head noted, “I thought we were quite good but BEST showed us a wider picture of children. We were strong in addressing the needs of children in school, but found that not all children were benefiting - there were a significant number with serious behavioural and mental health problem”.

Individual plans for each school followed the audit, and included, said one head, ‘a strong emphasis on capacity building – we always discussed a clear exit strategy’. However, some of the schools did not find the audit so useful, having already developed an action plan for behaviour and attendance, and in some the lesson observations were not included as part of the audit, as the headteacher deemed it inappropriate.

School developments. A range of individual initiatives and outcomes was agreed for each school following the audit, ranging from whole school, to individual pupil and family support. For many, work on creating or updating behaviour and anti-bullying policies was the starting point for development. In one school that was in difficulties at the time, the head said: “BEST enabled us to sort things out quickly, virtually within a term. Very effective systems were set up and the team worked on a variety of behaviour management strategies with individual class teacher”. In another school the team helped to establish effective behaviour logs and provided coaching for class teachers. This coaching or modeling approach was seen by heads as much more effective training than holding staff meetings. One teacher commented: “Without BEST I would have struggled – the work we did together in circle time and in small groups on feelings, strategies to be friends, and how to control behaviour had a huge impact on the really badly behaved”

BEST members provided much support for improving playtimes and lunchtimes. In one school they led play sessions with every class, set up systems and rewards for the playground and provided a play worker, on a daily basis initially, to promote playground friends and peaceful playtimes. In another school training and support was provided for lunchtime organizers; one said, “I learnt to encourage children to express themselves – to be more open. There’s no longer a wall between me and the children.” Another said, “I learnt to listen and talk things through”. In some schools lunchtime clubs were set up and run by the BEST and many of these are now run by the schools themselves. In one school BEST ran an after school homework and book making club aimed at particularly vulnerable children.

Members of the teams worked in many schools developing ‘circle of friends’ and buddy systems, often through the vehicle of circle time, which they used with teachers and teaching assistants. One lead behaviour professional said, “BEST had a profound impact on our teaching assistants – they became an empowering vision for the school”