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Written evidence submitted by Football Beyond Borders

Football Beyond Borders (FBB) are an education charity working with over 2000 11-16 year old vulnerable young people who are disengaged in mainstream education. Our key focus is on early assessment and intervention, developing relationships and belonging within school communities and improving young people’s wellbeing through building their sense of school community. FBB’s theory of change seeks to prevent school exclusions and drive GCSE attainment in English and maths through the development of social and emotional skills, which the EEF finds can lead to an additional four months’ progress over the course of a year. FBB are submitting evidence because we believe we have developed expertise in working with the most disadvantaged students in England over ten years of delivery, working with hundreds of different schools in different regions of the country.

We have provided evidence linked four key areas outlined in the call for evidence:

1. The evaluative criteria used to assess value for money included: whether DfE used the available evidence in designing its package of recovery interventions;
2. what evidence there is on take-up and whether the interventions are reaching disadvantaged pupils as intended
3. and whether the package of interventions is having an impact in terms of reducing learning loss

1. The evaluative criteria used to assess value for money included: whether DfE used the available evidence in designing its package of recovery interventions;

When designing FBB’s three-year business plan and model to target students in the most disadvantaged areas, FBB worked with Bain consultants to target ~20 local authorities, with ~250 eligible schools and ~80K FSM (free school meals) eligible young people, focusing on areas with poor outcomes (i.e., low FSM attainment and high exclusion rates) and high relative need (i.e., concentration of disadvantaged pupils). That the government has failed to ensure that this target population is effectively reached through the NTP is an oversight - the data is widely available.

2. what evidence there is on take-up and whether the interventions are reaching disadvantaged pupils as intended

From ten years of delivering our programme effectively in schools in England, FBB has developed practice-based evidence for working with the most disadvantaged students. To share this learning with our wider sector, in 2022 we published Therapists in Tracksuits: a guide on how to engage our most vulnerable young people. The report outlined five key areas which drive take-up of interventions within this group. Research included interviews with 35 young people.

Time: Time and the development of a positive relationship is a catalyst that unlocks impact. Most of the young people interviewed placed huge emphasis on the importance of long-term support as it helped to build trust, showed the commitment of the practitioner and allowed the practitioner to develop stronger relationships with the young person and other key actors in their life, at school and at home.

Choice: For many vulnerable young people, especially those at risk of exclusion, their experiences with interventions tended to be a negative one. This research found that the element of choice, rather than the ultimatum, had a huge impact on initial engagement and subsequently in shifting their perceptions. Children’s voices must be valued, respected and included, in their own care and support and within service / practice development.

Advocacy: Collaboration and effective streams of communication between the practitioner/teacher, the school and home were identified as one of the most important elements of the support offered to participants. Participants placed a huge value on the role the practitioner/teacher plays in deepening understandings of the young person’s context and then presenting this to the school. This wrap-around approach was crucial in ensuring information flowed efficiently and in developing effective support that engaged the young person, their family and their school.

Skills: A significant proportion of young people interviewed compared the expert support from counsellors compared to mentors and teaching assistants (TAs). While stressing how much they enjoyed their relationships with mentors and TAs, they felt that these staff members were more like “older friends” or “big brothers” rather than possessing the ability to help them work through difficult issues. This was most evident when posed the question: if it was up to you, who would you like to do your one to ones next year? When given the choice of their TA, mentor or FBB therapeutic practitioner, all the young people questioned chose their practitioner even when there was not a match of identities.

Belonging: For many participants the lived experience of the practitioner and their familiarity with the FBB programme as well as the appearance of the practitioner in the FBB tracksuit was a big determinant of initial engagement. For young people with negative relationships and general mistrust of school interventions, the familiarity of the FBB brand, the strength of relationships and the integration of one to one support into the existing group-based intervention were crucial. Taken together these helped remove stigma, partly due to FBB’s asset-based approach and partly due to the young person’s prior engagement with FBB.

3. and whether the package of interventions is having an impact in terms of reducing learning loss

Students on FBB’s programmes who were at-risk of exclusion at the start of their journey with FBB were eleven times more likely to achieve their GCSE English and maths than young people who were excluded from school and attending Alternative Provision and Pupil Referral Units. This shows our programme has a long-term impact on our students’ attainment at school. For the most disadvantaged and vulnerable students, a long-term approach is needed. It is difficult to estimate whether or not the package of interventions is having a positive impact on learning loss because that depends on the impact you are trying to measure. With long-term support, this data suggest that attainment improves.

The programmes being reviewed by the call for evidence are:

●        The National Tutoring Programme, which provides children with tutoring and mentoring;

FBB is not a tutoring organisation, however we do provide 1:1 therapeutic mentoring to all of our participants to support them to engage with learning content at school. We would implore the review to recognise the importance of inputting additional access provisions to ensure that young people with SEND and other complex needs are able to access learning content. We believe this is a huge barrier for the uptake in tutoring provision from those who need it most. 

●        Universal and targeted financial premiums paid directly to schools;

The issue with school’s choosing how to use this funding is that there are huge inconsistencies in the way this money is administered across different institutions. After Covid three inconsistencies in the way schools operate have particularly stood out to FBB:

1.     The young people most in need of the consistent, supportive adult relationships provided by school are those same young people who are least likely to finish this academic year in school because of school exclusion

2.     Schools receive no additional funding to support their most vulnerable students to stay in school, despite the strong evidence (from the Department for Education’s own review) linking involvement with social services with struggling at school

3.     The government invests five times more per student to support them in alternative provision than in keeping them in mainstream, despite academic attainment in alternative provision being dramatically worse than in mainstream.

Despite the financial premiums paid to schools, more must be done to ensure this support is provided specifically for the students who need it most. The IPPR’s call for a Vulnerability Premium would help to address this.

●        Training and continuing professional development for teachers and summer schools.

FBB provides reflective practice groups and continuous professional development to teachers in our partner schools and in 2021 won the Fair Education Alliance Innovation Award for our approach to this. A testimonial has been included below.

“The support through the Reflective Practice programme has been amazing. It has helped the inclusion team to stay balanced and given us a chance to offload and support each other. It truly has been one of the most memorable and impactful forms of development I have been involved in. The well being day was also an amazing opportunity to open this out to the whole school community. I think it has made all staff reflect on their well being, learn new skills and be vulnerable and able to understand the impact we all can have on each other and the students.”

Educational Welfare Officers at schools have a huge workload and difficult task. Their job is to support young people back into school and to deal with mental health challenges. A March 2019 DfE report found “an imbalance between supply and demand. Put simply, there are insufficient EPs both now and in the training pipeline to meet demand” since, demand has increased only increased and no support is offered to teachers to deal with the huge rise in mental health challenges and SEND diagnoses we have seen off the back of Covid.

Football Beyond Borders welcomes the five recommendations made by the NAO for education recovery in schools. We would urge the committee to consider the following questions during the review:

BE TRAUMA-INFORMED

What has happened to our vulnerable students to make it difficult for them to succeed?

EFFECTIVE INCLUSION

What additional support do our vulnerable young people need to thrive in mainstream school?

EARLY ASSESSMENT

How can we most quickly gain a detailed understanding of the support a young person will need to engage with catch-up?

EARLY INTERVENTION

What is the balance of resources we are allocating between pre-emptive intervention and reactive intervention?

RELATIONSHIPS

Who is the trusted adult relationship at school for disadvantaged young people?

CULTURAL COMPETENCY

How do teachers' professional expertise combine with their lived experience to enable them to do this work effectively?

TEACHER WELLBEING

How are we supporting teachers to be able to cope with the emotional challenges of working with vulnerable students?

WHOLE SCHOOL COMMUNITY

How do school communities counteract the challenges these young people face outside the school gates?

March 2023