Forum to consider the report.

Kelly Nash, Education Support and Strategy Manager (AfC), informed that a new project was taking place in the Borough: The Bungalow. She explained that there was a specialist teacher for medically vulnerable pupils in a statutory post. The aspiration for The Bungalow was to allow this specialist teacher to increase her ability to work with more children for a longer period; and therefore, increase children and young people’s access to education within their week, as well as provide a hub to support children transitioning and reintegrating back into mainstream schools. As reintegrating young people back into secondary education was a major challenge, the idea was to create a transition hub to successfully transition those children to school.

Kelly Nash informed that part of the work involved designing the curriculum, which she hoped would be online based so that children could access it when they were at home as well. She also hoped to recruit a medically vulnerable TA (teaching assistant), who would be on site at The Bungalow and ensure that all the safeguarding elements were covered. Alongside, there would also be other adults of the children and young people to access to help build up their resilience for their transition back into the mainstream.

AfC (Achieving for Children) had secured The Bungalow (on the grounds of Homer First School), which had been leased out by the school. Referring to the Table 2 in the report (page 59), Kelly Nash went over the estimated total costs per annum. The minimum number of pupils in the Medically Vulnerable base at any one time would be four but she hoped to achieve the maximum number of eight young people who would access The Bungalow quite quickly.

The Bungalow would be open three days a week (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) to give specialist teacher space to work alongside children/young people who were not ready to access the Medically Vulnerable base and still required a home tuition. The Bungalow would increase social interaction for those young people as a lot of them were isolated at home and struggled to get out and see people. The Bungalow was designed where there was an education space as well as a social area for them to interact. There was also consideration of adding nurturing and food preparation to the curriculum alongside the usual Maths, English and Science courses.

When asked by the Chair about the location, Kelly Nash responded that the old caretaker bungalow at Homer First School in Windsor was being used to provide it.

Joolz Scarlett conveyed concern about resilience due to The Bungalow having two members of staff, asking how this would be managed if, for example, one of them was off sick. She also asked what therapeutic input the children and young people were receiving. She suggested that this could be discussed further outside of the meeting. Kelly Nash replied that the focus was to increase the offer to young people. She acknowledged the concern of the responsibility being placed on two employees, stating this was the “beginning of a journey” and that there were responsive plans in place. She welcomed having a meeting with Joolz Scarlett outside of the meeting on how this could be improved and to answer further questions.

Joolz Scarlett then asked if Kelly Nash knew how many children met the criteria of being absent for 15 days, consecutively or cumulatively, elaborating that she suspected that there were many children which fell under this in which Kelly Nash was unaware of. She suggested this was an area of concern to highlight to headteachers, speculating that some were not notifying Kelly Nash. Kelly Nash agreed but added that the teaching specialist’s case load was a very strict criteria around the child needing to have medical evidence stating that they could not attend school. She received much information through the Pupils at Risk (PAR) panel where AfC supported schools by co-funding alternative interventions. This information gathering was expanding due to intelligence leads in school as well as from colleagues in the educational psychology service. Nevertheless, she acknowledged that there were young people who were part of the Medically Vulnerable base which AfC were unaware of and that this was something to work on.

The Chair commented that this was a positive step moving forward.

The Forum noted the report.