Driving apprenticeship success together

Apprenticeships are a smart way for young people to enter the world of work and for employers to tackle skills gaps and place employees where they need them most in their workforce.

That’s why at Pearson, we believe in and champion apprenticeships. Our focus is on delivering excellence at every step of the apprenticeship journey. From our trusted on-programme qualifications and engaging learning resources to our unrivalled end-point assessment (EPA) preparation resources and flexible EPA service.

As well as providing apprenticeship solutions for employers, at Pearson we offer apprenticeships to support our own talent pipeline. As a Levy Paying employer, apprenticeships have given us the ability to expand our work in Early Talent and recruit a far more diverse workforce than we did before.  

With many years of experience in vocational training, we’re committed to working collaboratively with employers and learning providers to ensure that apprentices have the best experience throughout their journey and develop the confidence and skills they need to progress to the next steps in their careers.

We know that the key to success with apprenticeships is planning and preparation from the start. As an ESFA-approved end-point assessment organisation, we put end-point assessment (EPA) at the heart of apprenticeship planning. We offer a flexible, responsive and streamlined EPA service and will work with you to deliver apprenticeships that drive apprentice success whilst providing visible benefits for your business. We understand that EPA is not a moment in time event prior to Gateway but should be embedded in the on-programme delivery right from the beginning.

“I have been really impressed with the Pearson EPAO development team. They have been extremely thorough in ensuring that the EPAs work for all parties and there is plenty of guidance and support in place for apprentices to support their EPA experience”. Design & Implementation / Relationship Manager, Openreach

With a 97% apprentice success rate in 2021, the benefits of Pearson Apprenticeships EPA services speak for themselves. These include:

  • Hand on support – Dedicated and specially trained EPA support team on hand to respond to queries.
  • Everything you need for EPA planning – Comprehensive set of EPA specifications, EPA resource packs and online training events to help you understand and prepare apprentices for EPA.
  • Fast results turnaround – Rich feedback and quick results turnaround to support progression and learner development.
  • Visibility on EPA planning and progress – Simple and seamless administration through a single system to register, book assessments or access resources, therefore saving time.
  • Competent end point assessors – Occupationally competent and personable assessors who have the learners’ best interests at heart.
  • Flexibility in EPA delivery – Assessment can be done remotely or face-to-face to meet the needs of learners and employers.

“Pearson’s experience, resources and systems reassured us during the selection process that we were making the right decision. We have developed a strong and positive partnership and really value the on-going support and advice provided to us by all the Pearson team.” Apprenticeship Business Manager, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

If you’re looking to change your EPA provider, then switching to deliver Pearson EPA is simple.  It’s a quick and easy three step process and our expert EPA delivery team will be on hand to help you every step of the way.

Find out more at go.pearson.com/switchyourepa

Revealed: 1 in 3 at risk BTECs saved from the chop

At least a third of the BTEC qualifications set to be axed in 2024 have been saved.

The Department for Education has today published the “final” list of level 3 qualifications that overlap with the first ten T Levels and face being defunded.

Of the 160 vocational and technical qualifications that were facing the chop, at least 106 will continue to be defunded in two years’ time. These courses account for around 38,000 current enrolments.

But a decision has been delayed on another 33 courses that overlap with health and science T Levels.

The content of these T Levels is being reviewed by the government after Ofqual found last year’s exams were not fit for purpose and led to results for over 1,000 students being regraded. The final outcome for these courses will be published later this calendar year.

It means the remaining 21 courses have been saved from the chop. They had been deemed to overlap with digital, construction and education and childcare T Levels.

Of these, 12 are BTECs offered by Pearson. A total of 38 BTECs were in line to be axed in the provision list.

Pearson’s popular BTEC national foundation diploma in engineering and BTEC national extended diploma in engineering, which both attract over 3,000 annual enrolments each, are among those to be saved.

A Pearson spokesperson said the company appealed to save 16 of its qualifications on the defunding list and was “pleased” that 12 were successful, adding that the DfE has “recognised that they are valued by learners, schools, colleges, universities and employers and are not replaced by T Levels”.  

“Schools and colleges should be reassured that they can continue to teach the vast majority of our BTEC qualifications into the future.”

OCR managed to make successful appeals for five of their seven qualifications facing the axe, while NOCN saved one of its seven, Excellence, Achievement & Learning Limited held on to two of their eight, and Engineering Construction Industry Training Board protected its only qualification in line to be defunded.

The DfE previously said there are around 2,000 existing courses in the vocational and technical qualifications space and in scope for the level 3 funding review, meaning just 5 per cent are so far certain to be cut.

The Sixth Form Colleges Association has been leading the #ProtectStudentChoice campaign to oppose the defunding process. Its deputy chief executive James Kewin said the list of level 3 qualifications published today suggests that the government is fulfilling its pledge to only remove funding for a “small proportion” of applied general qualifications.

He added that the decision not to defund any engineering BTECs “is particularly welcome”.

However, Kewin took issue with the DfE’s decision to continue reviewing courses that overlap with health and science T Levels.

He called on the government to “abandon its plans to defund these courses”.

“Their importance to the healthcare workforce, and the well-documented problems with the qualifications that are supposed to replace them, have greatly increased the risks associated with removing them,” Kewin said. “More broadly, requiring applied general qualifications that have been through this overlap process to now go through a further reapproval process is both bureaucratic and unnecessary.”

The DfE said its analysis of the final defunding list, excluding health and science, shows that students from special education needs and disabilities backgrounds, disadvantaged backgrounds, and those from white ethnic groups are “more likely to be disproportionately affected”.

More qualifications will be reviewed in future years as more T Levels roll out. A provisional list of qualifications that overlap with wave three and four T Levels in spring 2023 and awarding organisations will also be given the opportunity to appeal.

A DfE spokesperson said: “We are removing funding from a small number of qualifications that overlap with the first 10 T Levels so that young people have access to clearer, high-quality options, and employers can continue to access to the skilled workforce they need to thrive.

“This move, in combination with our wider review of qualifications, will make sure only qualifications that are necessary and lead to good outcomes are approved for public funding, delivering greater value for money for the taxpayer.”

David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said: “It’s good to see that the appeals were properly considered in a number of cases, and that the numbers being defunded is modest.

“But that should not distract from the fundamental issue here, that no qualifications which overlap with T Levels should be defunded until T Levels are fully tried and tested and we understand more about who can truly access and achieve in them.”

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: EDITION 402

Ellie Churchward

Head of Lifelong Learning and Skills, Sheffield City Council

Start date: September 2022

Previous job: Service Manager – Adult Community Education, Sheffield City Council

Interesting fact: Ellie started out as a soldier in the Royal Signals and still loves outdoor life. You’ll often find her on a campsite, but these days in more luxury as a motorhomer.

James Pallister

Head of Sales (Education), Metaverse Learning

Start date: October 2022

Previous job: Senior Manager, University Relations, Leverage Edu

Interesting fact: James collects Star Wars graphic novels and has a whole bookcase of them in his home office.

Mark Trewin

Principal – Adult education and skills, Plymouth City Council

Start date: October 2022

Previous job: Chief Transformation Officer, City College Plymouth

Interesting fact: For the last 32 years Mark has played in bands and once made a living from music and technical roles in the live events industry. He still performs today, with a highlight being an annual David Bowie tribute show which raises funds for St Luke’s Hospice in Plymouth.

OfS touts tough registration rules on sexual harassment

Universities and colleges are set to face stricter registration requirements by the higher education regulator, in a bid to tackle sexual harassment and misconduct.

The Office for Students (OfS) plans to consult on a new condition of registration early next year, which means it could be in place before the start of the next academic year. 

Colleges and universities risk losing their registration with the OfS if they fail to meet the new requirement.

The requirement is set to be introduced after an evaluation of the OfS ‘statement of expectations’ found that there were serious shortfalls in how colleges and universities were tackling sexual violence.

Susan Lapworth, chief executive of the OfS, told MPs on the women and equalities committee this week: “We’re working on a condition of registration that we would consult on early in the new year and that would put, subject to the consultation, this area of work [sexual harassment and misconduct] onto a sharper regulatory footing. It would put in place mandatory requirements, and it would allow us to intervene when we saw concerns.”

In April last year, the OfS published seven “expectations” which set out how universities and colleges should prevent and respond to incidents of harassment and sexual misconduct, after 50,000 accounts of sexual violence were published on the website Everyone’s Invited.

The statement of expectations provided recommendations for the systems, policies, and practices that institutions need to have in place to prevent and effectively respond to harassment and sexual misconduct.

Earlier this year, OfS commissioned an independent evaluation to look at the actions universities and colleges had taken to comply with their statement of expectations. The evaluation, set to be released next month, is expected to show that universities and colleges have taken some steps, such as making it easier for incidents to be reported.

“Patchy and too slow”

But the evidence from students – given as part of the evaluation – suggests that progress has been inconsistent and too slow. Many students don’t know what to do if this happens to them or have a poor experience when they report an incident of harassment.

Lapworth said: “[Students] said there has been progress, but it’s been patchy, and it is too slow. So we’re not seeing the impact that we would have expected. We signalled to universities and colleges that if that didn’t do the trick and drive the process then we would impose a condition of registration.”

Julian Gravatt, deputy chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said this is the “right thing for OfS to do”. He told FE Week, however, that there are “complications, because college safeguarding procedures are already regulated by DfE, and Ofsted”. 

Gravatt added: “We look forward to discussing the details with all three organisations to ensure the rules work for students and staff in our part of the HE sectors.”

Intervention

A new pilot prevalence survey was also announced by the OfS this week, which will collect data on sexual violence in higher education settings, and is set to run within the same timeframe as the registration condition consultation.

Lapworth could not say how much the new prevalence survey would cost but confirmed the importance of “conducting a carefully constructed sampling approach across the sector” to determine which sort of students are experiencing sexual violence so they can intervene when they need to.

Drawing on evidence from surveys from the National Union of Students’, Revolt Sexual Assault and Everyone’s Invited, Lapworth corroborated that students with particular characteristics, particularly disabled women and minority ethnic groups, are impacted more by sexual violence.

When asked whether bystander training will make up part of the new requirement, Lapworth confirmed that the OfS’ focus will be on credible, evaluated training.

Third college to go through FE insolvency regime owes £8m

The country’s smallest sixth form college has become the third college to ever go through the further education insolvency regime, closing with £8 million of debt.

St Mary’s College in Blackburn shut its doors to students and staff this summer after it failed to find a viable merger partner.

The Catholic-run college, which had been open for almost 100 years, became financially unsustainable due to repeated years of falling student numbers, and has been propped up by emergency government funding since 2020.

Accounting firm RSM UK has been appointed to handle the insolvency and published its first report on the process last month.

A “statement of affairs” revealed that the college owes £8.2 million to six creditors. The Local Government Pension Scheme is owed most of the debt – £5 million – while Barclays Bank is owed £2.8 million. The Department for Education is also one of the creditors, owed £62,000.

The college’s property is currently on the market for an undisclosed fee to generate funds to repay the creditors. But the insolvency practitioners’ report suggests a book value of just £402,795.

Asked how likely it was that the creditors will be repaid in full, joint liquidator Diana Frangou told FE Week: “Any distribution to creditors in the liquidation will be made from asset realisations which are currently in progress and hence uncertain.”

The first colleges to go insolvent

The further education insolvency regime came in force in January 2019, from which point it was made possible for colleges to fail and be placed into an insolvency process for the first time.

Scandal-hit Hadlow College was the first to go through the process later that year after an investigation from the FE Commissioner uncovered how the college ran out of money through leadership and governance failures. There were also claims of financial irregularities which led to investigations into the former management.

Hadlow’s sister college – West Kent and Ashford College – was the second to go through the FE insolvency regime later in 2019. Between them, the two colleges went under with debts of almost £150 million.

Department for Education officials previously revealed that the cost of putting the two colleges through the insolvency regime cost the taxpayer around £60 million. Most of this related to capital costs that needed to be spent to bring Hadlow’s and West Kent’s estates (which had been left in “very poor condition”) up to “reasonable standards” to be sold or taken over by other colleges.

St Mary’s College’s cause of insolvency is different to Hadlow’s and West Kent’s. It was first warned in 2016 of its deteriorating financial position and urged at the time to find a merger partner or academise.

It continued to survive on its own largely thanks to its higher education income and its commercial pre-school nurseries, but its ability to continue doing so came to a head in 2020 after student numbers failed to improve. Against a capacity of 1,250, there was only 653 students on roll at the time of an FE commissioner visit in 2020.

Growth predictions wrong

The FE Commissioner’s intervention report said “inaccurate growth predictions” at the college, which led to “over-optimistic expectations for student recruitment”, were the primary cause of financial failure.

A structure and prospects appraisal process was subsequently launched and invited potential partners to express an interest in partnering with St Mary’s, but no viable partner was found.

Kate Hollern, the MP for Blackburn, said: “The loss of St Mary’s College, an institution that has been part of our community for so long, was cause for great sadness. The financial pressures and dwindling student numbers the college suffered under were, of course, unfortunate.

“[The college] was a place where students felt empowered to fulfil potential and it boasted a good academic experience.”

The Department for Education told FE Week that it provided St Mary’s College with the “minimum level of emergency funding” to “protect learners and enable them to complete their courses”, but refused to reveal the total figure.

Frangou said an orderly wind down of the college completed in August, with all remaining 225 students completing their studies.

She said all staff employed by the college were made redundant on July 31, 2022, and they all received their “contractual and statutory entitlements upon redundancy in full, and therefore do not have claims in the liquidation”.

College management also “ensured all suppliers were paid in full prior to the liquidation”.

Frangou added that protecting the students and minimising disruption to their studies has been the “paramount objective of the college and the Department for Education” and to ensure this, a number of college staff were retained by the liquidators on a subcontract basis and funded by the DfE to guarantee that exam results could be received “in the normal way”.

The Department for Education said its current expectation is that “only costs directly related to learner activities, outside of the statutory duties of a liquidator required post-liquidation will be funded by the DfE”, although it will not release these figures.

One of the most controversial aspects of the Hadlow and West Kent insolvencies was the costs charged by the insolvency practitioners BDO, which reached £6 million and was described by the DfE’s permanent secretary Susan Acland-Hood as “gut-wrenching”.

RSM would not reveal its time costs and charge out rates, stating that these will be included in its first annual report a year after the liquidation began. Frangou said RSM’s fees and costs are “subject to approval by creditors and payable from net realisations from college assets”.

There is no suggestion of impropriety from St Mary’s Colleges former leaders or governors, but RSM said that as with all insolvencies, there is a “duty to investigate and submit a report on the conduct of the directors to the Insolvency Service within three months of the appointment”.

RSM said the report, which is “confidential”, will be considered by the Insolvency Service who will “take any action it sees fit”.

DfE forced to finally reveal true amount of apprenticeship funding returned to Treasury

Over £2 billion of apprenticeship funding has been returned to the Treasury since the launch of the levy, FE Week can reveal after obtaining figures that finally show the true extent of apprenticeship underspend.

The clawback equates to 23 per cent of the Department for Education’s total ring-fenced apprenticeship budget between 2017 and 2021.

Ministers have repeatedly refused to reveal exactly how much of the annual apprenticeship budget has gone unspent after the whole system, including non-levy paying employers, has been funded. MPs, including former DfE adviser Richard Holden just yesterday, have even had requests for this information turned down.

FE Week, in partnership with the new Apprenticeships Data Insights service also operated by our publisher LSECT Ltd, has now forced the DfE to reveal the figures for the first time through a Freedom of Information request.

Tom Richmond, a former adviser to two skills ministers and now director of think tank EDSK, said: “We need full transparency over where the levy funding has gone and how effectively it has been used. On that basis, it should not have taken so long for such a simple but crucial piece of information about underspends to come to light.”

He added: “Now that we can see the scale of the underspend, it raises important questions about why the levy funding has not been fully utilised, particularly when there is still a cap on the number of apprenticeship starts in small and medium-sized businesses.”

Since 2017, businesses with a payroll of £3 million or more pay each month into a levy pot and have a rolling 24-month deadline to spend the funds.

The levy policy was designed so that large employers wouldn’t use all of their funds. The unspent money is recycled and made available to small businesses who do not pay the levy to use to train their apprentices. Unspent funds are also used to top up levy funds by ten per cent as well as pay for English and maths teaching for relevant apprentices, among other things.

But because the government refuses to share annual spending data, there are many misconceptions in the sector and national media that all apprenticeship funding that expires from levy accounts goes back to the Treasury.

The Financial Times, for example, reported in July that more than £3.3 billion of apprenticeship funding had been returned to the Treasury since 2019. But this figure was in fact the amount of funding that had expired in levy-payers’ levy accounts and did not take into consideration that part of this funding would pay for other parts of the system.

In each year since the levy was introduced FE Week has requested the true apprenticeships budget underspend from the DfE press office, and after receiving provisional figures to this effect from the department’s press office, published articles that showed £880 million had been returned to Treasury between 2017 and 2021.

The DfE has now revealed through an FOI that £424 million in 2017-18, £493 million in 2018-19, £550 million in 2019-20, and £604 million in 2020-21 was surrendered to Treasury.

The DfE said it could not share the figures for 2021-22 because its accounts for that financial year “have not been audited and published” yet.

John Cope, a board member of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, said the figures “highlight a real issue: the need for greater transparency on how the apprenticeship levy works”.

He added that the underspend figures “need to be taken with a massive pinch of salt as they are for pandemic years when many firms were unable to trade, and the government spent huge amounts on the Kickstart scheme as well as employer incentives to take on apprentices”.

Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Jane Hickie said the reasons for an underspend on the apprenticeship levy “are complex – from the ongoing impact of the pandemic on learner numbers to wider trends in the labour market”.

She also called for “much more transparency and up-to-date information from government on the level of underspend”.

Mental health: 8 key priorities to take the sector forward

This Monday marked the tenth World Mental Health Day, an opportunity to reflect on the progress made, and the work still to do. And my first reflection is that, while WMHD is an important date in the calendar, supporting mental health is a 365-days-a-year job.

The Mental Health Foundation, a key partner of Good for me, Good for FE, wants “mental health and wellbeing for all to be global priority”. We know that the further education sector is at its best when it thinks globally and acts locally, and I’m proud of the progress we’ve made towards that end.

A few short years ago, mental health support felt marginal, at times even radical. Some saw it as overstepping our territory from the educational to the clinical. But a vanguard of colleges, my own included, pursued this area of support, recognising that our students needed good or at least well-supported mental health to study and achieve.

Hitting the mainstream

Fast forward, and now over 200 colleges have signed the Association of Colleges’ (AoC) mental health charter. Stigma is reduced across the sector. Our literacy around discussing mental health is thoughtful, our understanding deepening and being refined.

There are commitments on college-wide strategies, discussions among senior teams and governors, mental health first aid-trained staff are present in most colleges, with access to counselling, nurses, and tutorials common. Human resources teams have maturing policies, practices, and cultures.

Supporting student and staff mental health has now become mainstream.

One of the people the sector should thank for that is Richard Caulfield at AoC. We worked together with other ‘pioneers’ to connect with the Department for Work and Pensions and the NHS to bring resources into colleges while the education department was playing policy catch-up.

There are now teams at the DfE that have both mental health and further education in their job titles, which is an encouraging development and demonstrates a recognition in policy. Hopefully that will one day transform into funding. Meanwhile, Ofsted now has lines in the handbook about developing learner “resilience and knowledge so that they can keep themselves mentally healthy”. 

Pushing forward

But the development of mental health in colleges is far from the end. The time is now to move this work from a deficit model to one that is more proactive, and also supports wider sector ambitions. Right now, there are still areas of work in colleges which would benefit from a mental health lens.   

The cost of living crisis

External conditions are putting overwhelming pressure on individuals and families, leading to poorer mental health.

Staff wellbeing

That means enhancing support but also creating and maintaining better boundaries between work and life.

Inclusion

Broader sector ambitions around equality, diversity and inclusion mean recognising the lasting mental health effects of discrimination.

Off-site provision

We must ensure all employers are supporting students on placement and apprenticeships to the same standard we hold ourselves to. 

Leadership

The sector needs better support, research and training (already positively begun by ETF) to create inclusive and sustainable conditions for its leaders. 

Neurodiversity

There’s scope for big improvements in our recruitment practices for neurodiverse staff and learners.

Action

Increased demand for college services remains largely unfunded, putting pressure on the sector and affecting mental health across the board. We need to lobby!

A united front

Some curriculum areas have been slower to engage with the agenda due to sector culture. (We see you, construction and engineering!) That needs to change.

At East Coast College, we have declared this the ‘year of belonging’. We’re focused on how students might have felt socially, culturally and emotionally excluded following the pandemic. Mental health is the foundation for inclusion, and in turn for academic performance. It should be seen as such.

The sector has so much to be proud of, but challenges remain that are a key priority for us all. So, see you again next World Mental Health Day to celebrate more of our successes!

The DfE’s consultation puts family learning at stake

Recently, stakeholders across FE and community learning have highlighted the potential impact of the department for education’s FE Funding and Accountability Consultation, which closed on 12 October.

The DfE proposes that a new set of outcome measures should apply to non-qualification provision, including entering employment or moving closer to the labour market. HOLEX policy director, Susan Pember warns that “these proposals, if implemented, would lead to a loss of a vast number of critical adult education courses” affecting some 300,000 adult learners or more.

Meanwhile, in our new discussion paper, ‘Bringing it All Back Home’, Sam Freedman recommends that the DfE should ensure its proposals don’t reduce family learning provision by forcing providers to focus on labour market outcomes.

Family learning provision is funded through the Adult Education Budget (AEB). It supports parents to engage in their children’s education and development from early years through to FE. And crucially, it often provides a vital first step back into learning for adults, especially for those who are economically inactive and who may be far from the labour market.

For many parents, helping their children is a powerful motivator to get involved in learning.

Family learning is therefore not only a driver of positive outcomes for children, but also for adults. And like adult education, there are multiple and wide-ranging outcomes too. From building parents’ own confidence in learning and widening aspirations for them and their children, to supporting better health and wellbeing and better finances, to developing new skills and progressing into FE.

Family learning acts as a bridge into mainstream FE

For example, our family finance programme for parents with English as an Additional Language resulted in 98 per cent of parents changing how they dealt with money, and 91 per cent of their children said it helped them too.

For adults who lack confidence and motivation to sign up directly for college courses, family learning programmes act as a positive bridge into mainstream FE. The experience of running family learning outreach programmes for a college demonstrates this: 24 parents in one school alone completed teaching assistant qualifications in FE, a direct result of taking family learning courses.

Parents who take family learning courses have varied needs and skills levels. The strength of family learning provision is that it can be shaped to the needs of the community. For people who lack confidence and aspiration, learning journeys are often not linear. Moving into further learning and employment for them is not an immediate step, though it may be a longer-term result of first engaging in family learning – which is why we need to protect the provision that offers a step back into learning.

Campaign for Learning shares the concerns of stakeholders across FE and community learning. Family learning provision is usually non-qualification based. The proposed measures are inappropriate for family learning where the emphasis is on children and parents improving learning outcomes together; they put its funding and participation at stake.

We must ask why the DfE proposes to prescribe outcome measures for non-qualification bearing provision, given the extent of the application nationwide. More and more areas of England are being granted devolution deals which cover the Adult Education Budget that funds family learning.

The assumption is that devolved authorities will determine how much to spend on family learning and the outcome measures which should apply. Given that most of the country will be covered by devolution deals, there seems little point in the DfE prescribing outcome measures that will include family learning in a limited number of areas.

We need to retain the flexibility and decision-making capacity of local areas and providers so that they can respond to the needs of families in their communities – especially at a time of flux.

This must mean flexibility of outcomes too.

The Staffroom: Becoming a ‘trauma-informed’ setting

As a society, we have a better understanding of the effects of early childhood trauma. More recently, many education settings are training staff to be ’trauma-informed’ and adopting strategies to support children and young people to overcome some of their early trauma and have the best possible life chances.

At North Hertfordshire College like so many other settings, we’ve seen an increase in more vulnerable students. Then there’s the impact of Covid and working with the virtual school, we’ve seen an increase in the numbers of care-experienced students on our roll too.

Hence, we’ve taken positive steps on a journey to become a trauma-informed setting.

The term ‘trauma-informed’ means to understand how trauma in a child’s early life impacts their overall development. Examples of early trauma are abuse, neglect, bereavement, incarceration of a parent and being placed in care. These traumatic events in a child’s early start in life are collectively known as ‘adverse childhood experiences’ or ACEs.

We have three ‘systems’ in our brains: the threat system (how we deal with danger/protection), the soothing system (how we manage distress/promote bonding) and the drive system (motivation/achievement). ACEs affect how these systems develop.

For example, a child who has suffered abuse and has spent much of their life in a constant state of fear will have an overdeveloped threat system. This can often present in different types of behaviour, such as anger, defiance, tearfulness, becoming withdrawn and/or being confrontational. Typically, children with this experience will also have an under-developed soothing system and find it difficult to self-regulate.

At North Herts, we know the key to good support is to develop a good understanding of our young people: their behaviours, their triggers, what de-escalation strategies they respond to and how to help them recover.

The impact of this evidence-informed work is transformational

Our Health and Social Care teacher, Taylor Smith, has a group of 18 students of which five have experienced ACEs. Two have been out of mainstream education, two are care-experienced and one suffers with severe mental health issues.

The typical behaviours Taylor was seeing in class at the start of the year included the inability to engage in formal learning, aggression, ignoring instruction, attendance issues, outbursts, anger and lashing out at peers. Taylor was spending a lot of time dealing with challenging behaviour which was disrupting learning, and this hugely affected the rest of the class in other ways too.

Becoming trauma-informed gave Taylor the strategies to support her students. Her approaches include a ‘roots and fruits’ activity to look at the behaviours and explore the feelings behind them and the reasons for those feelings.

Taylor also works with the students to understand the behaviours themselves, which involves a risk reduction plan, breaking down triggers, understanding needs, and post-incident recovery. As trauma-informed practitioners, we understand how a student processes their trauma and how they best recover. This will include how a student likes to calm down, how they move on and how to move back into learning mode.

The impact for our students is significant. Taylor reports fewer dangerous and difficult behaviour incidents. Students are completing higher quality work. They are all achieving minimum grades and four achieved stretch grades. And general behaviour has improved in class too; all students can sit and engage in their lessons and all have engaged in a full year of formal education.

We are still on our journey, but the impact this evidence-informed work is having is already transformational. We work with an external partner, Beyond Psychology, which is supporting a core team of staff to lead this work across all parts of our organisation. So more of us are learning the theory behind this approach and developing the tools to make a difference.

We know from this that working with students with ACEs during the teenage years can significantly reverse some of the effects of early trauma. Our students deserve the best chance in life, and we are excited to continue this work and to see what more they can achieve.