This is a proposal for re-thinking, re-provisioning and re-energising secondary education across the whole of North East Lincolnshire. It seeks to replace the existing 12 secondary schools with a collaborative of 11 distinctive, modernised, extended, full-service and networked schools.

This vision for secondary education in North East Lincolnshire centres on the primacy of learning and takes as its starting point the different aspirations, ambitions, aptitudes and abilities of our learners.

The logic of the vision develops in the following order:

Learner - curriculum - student organisation - teaching approaches - recruitment, retention and deployment of staff - use of resources, including ICT - on site access to support services - community use and involvement - building design - leadership and management.

The outcomes of this vision are about access to learning for all and significantly higher levels of personal achievement.

Curriculum
The Key Stage 3 curriculum provides the opportunity to develop confidence and competence in the basic skills of literacy, numeracy and ICT and to use these to access and to gain knowledge, skills and understandings in all the other compulsory subjects.

This broad range of subjects offered to all, coupled with opportunities for curriculum extension and enrichment, and with access to ‘extra-curricular’ activities, allows young people to find their areas of interest and talent. The Key Stage 3 experience prepares and helps shape students’ decisions for post-14 learning.

Getting Key Stage 3 right is fundamental to post-14 success. The national emphasis on Key Stage 3 through accountability for results and implementation of the national Key stage 3 strategy is echoed locally.

Key Stage 4 is characterised by flexibility ensuring all students have access to and engage on appropriate learning journeys that will take them through the 16+ threshold and beyond.

Patterns of collaboration that include schools, colleges and work-based providers are already well established. The Local Learning Partnership publishes annually a directory of courses offered by all learning providers in North East Lincolnshire. This directory allows students in any institutional base to select, with guidance, pathways available anywhere in the Borough. The vision develops and extends curriculum collaboration that has already attracted national interest.

Specialist schools are a crucial element of the vision. All schools will provide ‘centres of excellence’ above and beyond overall high-quality provision, allowing teachers and learners to develop abilities and talents to their furthest point.

Student Organisation
‘Batching’ students in groups of thirty and the traditional annual progression by age may not be maximising achievement.

The vision opens possibilities for alternative forms of organisation. Some learning centres see benefits in organising Year 7 and Year 8 around the successful model used in primary schools where classes are taught by a smaller number of different teachers.

Teaching ‘key lessons’ to large groups of students with assisted follow-up work in smaller groups and the opportunity to undertake individual study are possibilities already being investigated. Building design currently limits these possibilities.

Students with both high and low levels of achievement may benefit by working at different rates. The vision is that no barriers should exist that prevent individual or groups of students from maximising their personal rate of learning.

The LEA has reviewed its guidance as well as its approach to challenging and supporting schools in providing for students at both ends of the attainment spectrum (Gifted and Talented Policy, SEN Policy)

Teaching approaches
The Education Development Plan has a priority on ‘developing excellent teaching’. Founded on recent educational research it promotes the themes of teaching for learning and assessment for learning. National leaders in the field have been brought into the LEA to provide conferences and training.

An objective of the vision is to continue to develop the craft of teaching. An increasing network of researching teachers along with a cadre of ‘leading teachers’ form a professional leading edge.

The Key Stage 3 strategy has re-energised the debate on teaching for learning. This is already spilling over into Key Stage 4 with an emphasis on developing study skills for independent learning.

Recruitment retention and deployment of staff
Different ways of organising teaching for learning, and student groupings, coupled with the increased range of available support staff (learning mentors, classroom support assistants, technicians and teaching assistants) together challenge the traditional ways staff are deployed.

The workforce remodelling agenda is understood locally as providing an opportunity to initiate a continuous process for deploying all staff in ways that maximises the impact on raising levels of achievement. Most significantly it focuses the professional contribution that teachers bring to enabling learning.

The vision goes beyond the national remodelling agenda looking at ways in which expertise in the community can be brought in to enhance and enrich curriculum opportunity. It also builds on the success of the Education Action Zone, now an Excellence Cluster, where staff, including teachers, work across different schools making efficient use of scare expertise. Such cross-area working offers new career opportunities and supports recruitment and retention.

A feature of the vision includes on-site accommodation for trainee teachers from out of the area. This extends a successful local project that has already received national attention where trainee teachers in institutions outside the area temporarily locate to North East Lincolnshire for their school based training. Given that over half of newly qualified teachers nationally are offered employment during their ‘trainee-ship’ this initiative brings direct benefit to local schools.
On-site childcare facilities will take down barriers for those with young children who choose to work in any capacity in the new learning centres.

Use of resources including ICT
Uses of ICT to benefit learning and teaching in North East Lincolnshire have been recognised both nationally and internationally. We are on track to provide all teaching spaces with electronic whiteboards. All students have use of the LEA-wide virtual desk top located on our web-site tlfe.org.uk that now receives 1.8M hits each month and provides learning resources to both learners and teachers.

A DfES funded project is trialing a combination of video-conferencing with linked interactive whiteboards that makes real-time interactive participation in lessons taught from one location accessible in other locations both within the school and across schools. This approach informs and challenges thinking on the deployment of advanced skills teachers, bringing their expertise to large numbers of students. (see tlfe.org.uk/visions)

The vision sees all eleven learning centres sharing resources and expertise using these new ICT possibilities. The virtual desktop that provides all students and teachers with their own e-mail addresses takes teaching and learning beyond the boundaries of the school environment and opening times.

On-site access to support services
The vision embraces the concept of the full-service school. All students need help in various degrees in order to select and complete their learning journeys. Information, advice and guidance is available to all students, providing them with tools to plan, navigate and chart their progress.

For those who struggle to keep on their chosen track and for those whose life circumstances present particular challenges, the new learning centres will provide combined and coherent support services.

The Council has already combined into a single Directorate, its education and childcare functions. Purpose-built locations on learning centre campuses will act as operational outreach centres where personnel from services supporting young people, their families and the school will work together to ensure students’ life-chances are maximised, extending multi-agency provision already in place in some schools. The vision incorporates recommendations made in the Green Paper ‘Every Child Matters’.

Appropriate spaces will be designed into the new learning centres to enable and facilitate the best practice to support pupils with special educational needs. Spaces will be provided for learning centres to continue and extend the successful practice of learning-support units that cater for those whose behaviour is interrupting their own learning and that of others. On-site locations with on-site services underpin this authority’s vision for educational inclusion.

Community use and involvement
Pooling and sharing school and community facilities is a common sense approach to the cost efficient deployment of resources.

Schools who do share resources, including sports and recreation, ICT, theatre/cinema and arts, adult learning bases, business locations and spaces for clubs and societies, report productive benefits to their schools in terms of community interest and support, as well as access to sources of talent in the community.
The vision sees the new learning centres as hubs of community activity bringing new senses of identity and pride to local communities. As well as sharing facilities the possibility is open to sharing learning and bringing into learning those who may be disconnected. The vision intends to raise the school leaving age from 16 to 90!

Building design
The design of buildings is a function of the purposes and vision outlined above. This is a 180 degree turn from the present position where provision is a function of design.

The vision anticipates designs of buildings radically different to those that currently exist. They will be fit for purpose and accessible to all. The LEA is aware of the latest DfES building bulletins and looks forward to the publication of the exemplar design portfolios.

The design of each of the eleven new learning centres will reflect their distinctive characteristics, specialism, size, location and environment. The detailed proposals for each centre are attached.

Leadership and management
The eleven learning centres will require determined and inspirational leadership along with exceptional management in order to realise the promise of raised levels of achievement.

Though highly distinctive in their particular patterns of provision, affording choice and diversity within overall high quality, the eleven centres will collaborate to provide energy sources feeding an area-wide learning network. The total outcome will be more than the sum of the parts.

Neighbouring primary schools to each centre will benefit from deeper collaborations with the centres, sharing expertise and resources.

Conclusion
The vision not only transforms secondary education but it also exemplifies new thinking on how the Council will deliver services, based on the principle of sculpting provision around customer needs. In this sense the learning centres enable combined multi-agency service to young people, their families and schools, to be delivered out in the community at the point of need.

The proposal has been carefully mapped into existing and planned provision through Sure Start and forthcoming Children’s Centres to create an efficient community support network.
This cross-cutting proposal will deliver higher levels of personal achievement and fulfilment, facilitate community renewal and contribute towards economic regeneration. It benefits the most crucial factors that affect people’s choices whether to come to live in or stay in our area, notably;

• quality of educational provision
• cultural vibrancy
• community identity
• quality of service provision

Special Educational Needs
The LEA has one PMLD/SLD and one MLD school with most other SEN needs being met in schools. These schools are outside the scope of this proposal.

Compared with other LEAs, a higher proportion of students with SEN has their needs met within mainstream settings. This project intends to retain this scale of mainstream SEN provision and ensure that appropriate resources are available to deliver the highest quality of services to meet learners’ individual needs. New and remodelled schools will have designated accommodation along with bespoke facilities for learners, teaching and non-teaching staff. These in-school bases will provide locations for students with SEN to interact with services provided by the LEA SEN support service, educational psychologists, speech therapists and other outreach support provided by the two special schools (for example, to autistic pupils). Further support will be available from staff based in the on-campus resource centres.

Pupil Behaviour
The LEA has one PRU with 58 places for pupils of secondary age. 9 out of the 12 existing secondary schools have in-school learning support centres. With teams of designated staff and visiting multi-agency support staff, these centres provide for the induction of students excluded from other schools and for those with particular learning or emotional difficulties. The LEA intends to extend this provision further by locating on school campuses 'family resource centres’ staffed with multi-agency support staff including educational welfare officers, social workers, youth workers, family support workers and Connexions personal advisers. Based in the community, this team will link with community police, community health care, Youth Offending Team, Drugs Action Teams and voluntary agencies. Family Resource Centres offer services directly to their immediate community and provide a responsive service to the school on the campus on which they are located. A critical component of this on-site provision is healthcare, particularly in the areas of mental and sexual health and the promotion of healthy living, which ties into the LEA’s support to schools seeking and maintaining their ‘Healthy Schools Standard’. In this way a coherent and connected service, with knowledge of the community, is offered to the young person, the family and the school.

By replacing linear tracks of referral by located multi-agency problem-solving and advice teams, issues of learner disengagement and disaffection can be dealt with both promptly and within the local context. The combined directorate of learning and childcare is well placed and ready to react to this identified need to improve its response to securing social and educational inclusion. It is keen to disperse to the community front-line the expertise that is currently in centre-based disciplinary teams.

There is increasing pressure on the LEA budget to meet the needs of pupils with more complex behaviour difficulties. Cost of out-of-area day and residential placements are rising along with transport costs to more distant locations. The LEA intends to use one of its vacated sites to lease a location to the private sector to build and provide both residential and day EBD services. The contract will include at-cost provision of 25 places to local need and 25 additional places to be sold out to other LEAs at competitive profit levels.