Agenda item

The Director of Children’s Services, Jon Abbey, presented this item to the Committee, the report for which had already been circulated prior to the meeting. Key points noted during the update included:

• The 6% uptick in take up of free early child education places for eligible two years old, highlighting growth in population
• There have been talks with CMST regarding more work and exploration about take up regarding youth play and adventure playground offer.
• The numbers of looked after children was reducing, Islington had historically high numbers and possibly one of the highest rates in London. 401 was recorded in the summer of 2022-23 but was down to 351 for Q3, and as of Friday (17^th March), it was 327.
• Children’s contact – there had been a reduction in the numbers recorded.
• Persistent absences for primary and secondary, the provisional data is higher than it would have been in previous reporting periods. There was an action plan being put in place by Pupil Services, targeting those schools marked as red/amber, increasing efforts to bring pupils back into school and make them visible.
• There had been encouraging performance from Young Islington in preventing young people from being victims or perpetrators of crime. For the metric of young people being diverted away from the criminal justice system, there was strong performance with a 96% rate recorded for Quarters 1 to 3 compared to the previous year

In response to questions from the Committee concerning the quality of judgements made by inspectors and whether it should be continued to use as a metric, the Director of Children’s Services responded by stating that Ofsted rulings had always been very subjective, but that for any individual or organisation in a position of authority and/or responsibility there should be accountability and that Ofsted was part of that established framework of regulation.

In response to questions from the Committee concerning the Progress 8 score and reducing disparities for the Black Caribbean cohort of children, the Director of Children’s Services Jon Abbey noted that Islington’s ambition was to being the top quartile of performance and that performance was benchmarked against London data. Many contributing circumstances were cited such as certain subject’s weightings, and the means in which schools approach the curriculum for their students. The Director of Learning and Achievement, Sarah Callaghan, also told the Committee that the Key Stage 4 attainment rate had increased by 7%, and that Islington’s secondary schools had one of the highest performance rates over the last three years.

In response to questions from the Committee on repeat looked after children, the Director of Safeguarding and Family Support, Laura Eden, told the Committee that the audit had been completed, and that there were two sets of data on this within the report, the first data set was quarterly, showing that there were three repeat looked-after children in Q3 and the other data set was cumulative, with the figure being less. The themes behind these cases included children becoming re-looked after, having been remanded to local authority care for an offence which was then dropped, only for either a new offence to be committed or a change in family circumstance bringing them back into care via a different path. There was also the first ever instance for Islington of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children becoming re-looked after took place during this year, following interim relief orders from the Court.

In response to questions from the Committee concerning the increase in NEETs (not in employment, education or training), Sarah Callaghan, Director of Learning and Achievement told members that there had been a small reduction in numbers of young getting a September offer for post-16 education, correlating with an increase in of home-educated children. The Progress team were doing a lot of work around this cohort of young people and following up with schools on tracking of student’s progress to capture where young people may begin to fall behind. A pilot, preventative model was also in operation in two of the borough’s secondary schools.

A member of the Committee cited national news reports of the passing of a headteacher following an Ofsted visit, to which the member expressed that in Islington officers should be stepping in to ensure the wellbeing of the borough’s teaching staff, stressing that good school results in tandem with good staff wellbeing should be the ultimate aim. In response, the Head of School Improvement, Anthony Doudle informed members of the Committee that lots of resources were available to support staff with health and wellbeing and that this was provided primary by the Council’s Health and Wellbeing team. There was also a self-sustaining group of local headteachers that provided support to each of its’ members. Of the 18 Ofsted inspections this year, a key feature among the reports was around reducing workload and improving mental health and wellbeing

In response to questions from the Committee concerning whether the exam results of home educated children was being recorded, the Head of Pupil Services, Candy Holder, informed the Committee that every family in the relevant is contacted with information on how to register for public examinations at local centres, and for the families that take up the offer at local centres, the Council would know of the results. However, the results do not count towards the borough’s statistics. Pupil Services are in regular contact with home educated families, even where they have declined to organise exams through them.

In response to questions from the Committee regarding whether a theme was emerging on persistent absences, the Head of Pupil Services informed members that ill-health (particularly, physical illnesses) was one of the primary causes of persistent absence. Islington was described as an outlier in that regard, and that the problem had increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Collaboration will health colleagues was taking place and a dedicated nurse put in place to visit schools.

In response to questions from the Committee on whether there were different absence codes in effect, and whether that and/or lateness of children travelling across the borough were taken into account, the Head of Pupil Services, Candy Holder, told members that in terms of the absence codes, the same applied to both primary and secondary. They were useful to some degree, but the markers for illness didn’t differentiate between colds and COVID for example, and Pupil Services were in the process of asking schools to try and record that separately for analysis. Small tolerances of lateness also didn’t count as an absence marker unless the instance was extreme, but regular lateness would be followed up with families.

It was noted that there was still disproportionality in the attainment figures for children of Black Caribbean heritage. In response, officers from Children’s Services informed the Committee that they were working very closely with Year 6 teachers to think about how to improve progress for this cohort of children, particularly in Maths problem-solving papers which was where most of the issues was found and considering approaches such as adapting the language used.