By Maureen McTaggart
As head of a virtual school, Terry Baker's work is free of corridor skirmishes, lunch queues and other physical diversions of a "real" school. Instead he and his staff of six – a deputy, three full-time and two part-time teachers – focus on driving up standards among Hammersmith and Fulham’s 250 looked-after children, regardless of where they go to school.
With a successful pilot in 2008 revealing that a virtual school run like a traditional one – with head, deputy and classroom teachers – improves children's attainment, Baker and his staff had only one problem. How to communicate effectively with pupils, carers, teachers and other responsible professionals without the luxury of a Friday morning assembly for group meetings and announcements. Enter Fronter.
A successful partnership with Fronter, the learning platform provider and the local Kingwood City Learning Centre (CLC) to provide ICT training and technical support means that teachers are now raring to go.
“The whole idea of the virtual learning environment just seems to be so suited to what we were looking for,” says Terry Baker. “Care placements break down for various reasons, and moving around means some of our children live quite a disrupted life, so communication is hugely important to us. Not least because we want these young people to feel part of where they belong in Hammersmith and Fulham whilst also settled where they are, but also for everyone to be communicating and linking with each other.”
All teachers at the virtual school are fully qualified and many have experience of teaching in the borough’s schools. That's a distinct advantage given that a vital part of their role is to negotiate a positive relationship with staff at the traditional school. And although their job is not to teach directly, they will have to track and monitor progress, help set targets and ensure that learners get all the support they need and, in some cases, offer extra support.
“This is a difficult concept for some people to get,” says Baker who has been headteacher in a number of special schools. “Looked-after children are on roll at their own school but their early experiences - disruptive family life and schooling - mean that many are underachieving dramatically. So we are supporting, challenging, seeing what else we can do to enhance their access to the curriculum so that they learn and make progress.”
The virtual school will have its own site within Fronter, which will include resources and extra courses to enhance their learning. Each child, foster carer and social worker will have a log-on and a password and, says deputy head Diana Samuelson, so too will every teacher in the school the children are at.
“Many young people that we work with don’t have very good role models," she says. "However, many go on to achieve quite amazing things so we also want it to be a place where we can share good news stories, and celebrate success.
"Often our children are quite isolated and don’t get to hear all this because they are not in a school assembly to hear how well their peers are doing. There are lots of opportunities and ways that we can use this to inspire young people and make it a place where they can belong and feel positive about it.”
Katherine Douglas, the Kingwood CLC director who oversees the ICT and e-safety training programmes for carers and social workers, applauds the virtual school's coherence across the authority. She says supporting the development of the virtual school is in line with many of the projects dear to the CLC. These include accreditation-based courses for pupils to access online as part of extended learning opportunities outside school.
“The whole point about the virtual school being online is that anyone can have access from anywhere and its irrelevant whether schools have Fronter or not or whether they use it or not. Of course it is marvellous if they are at schools that have Fronter because it makes it a bit more streamlined, but there is no barrier to them accessing it so long as they’ve got access to the web."
Everyone involved in the virtual school claims they don’t want to sound philosophical by saying it isn’t a project but a transition. The notion is one of changing the way they used to do things with the focus remaining firmly on the learning.
“The learning platform enables us to keep reinforcing that, because even for those of us who feel passionate about the learning sometimes it gets sidelined with the operational and the box-ticking that we have to do," says Katherine Douglas. "It's something that stops the marginalisation of learning and Fronter is evolving at last in response to what people want the technology to do, not people doing what the technology can do.”
More information
Virtual School for Looked After Children, 2nd Floor, Barclay House, Effie Road, Fulham, London SW6 1EN
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Fronter
BETT2010
You can fnd out more about Virtual School for Looked After Children on the Fronter stand at the BETT Show at Olympia in January (13-16). Stand J10
