Evolve Health Mentors spend a full academic year in school with the children staff identify as needing the most support. They set weekly goals with each child and build trust through breakfast clubs, lunchtime activities and after-school sessions.
A diagnosis buys time. Time buys support. In England’s SEND system, that currency isn’t distributed evenly. Professor Susana Castro-Kemp at the University of Birmingham has a name for this. Diagnostic Capital.
A student walks into the exam hall in June having had five years of good teaching behind them. Some of them don’t perform anywhere close to what that teaching should produce, and the reason often has nothing to do with what they know.
Ella Bento was named Health Mentor of the Year at Evolve’s annual conference this month, recognising her first year mentoring care-experienced children and young people across Wirral Virtual School’s six settings.
As we approach the end of the academic year, it is time for our fourth and final data collection point, Term 3 (T3). For schools using the Evolve Development Tracker (EDT), this is the most critical window of the year.
The Department for Education has recently published its new Enrichment Framework, promising every child an entitlement to culture, sport and time outdoors. It joins a long line of similar papers, most recently the Every Child Achieving and Thriving White Paper.
957,000. That’s how many 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK were not in education, employment or training at the end of last year. Line them up and you’d have a population bigger than Leeds, bigger than Glasgow, bigger than Cardiff. And it’s still rising.
The Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) recent response to the Department for Education’s SEND consultation feels like a masterclass in institutional inertia. As reported in Schools Week, the EEF warned that “significant evidence gaps” on what works for SEND pupils could pose a major challenge to the government’s upcoming inclusion reforms.
The UK education landscape is at a crossroads. As we move toward the ten-year vision outlined in the Department for Education’s (DfE) Every Child Achieving and Thriving White Paper, the focus is shifting towards “support-first” models. At the heart of this shift is the recognition that inclusion, belonging and relationships are central to short, medium and long term outcomes for our next generation.
The “once-in-a-generation” youth justice reform announced on Monday marks a decisive shift from a system that is reactive to one that is truly preventative.
The Youth Justice White Paper acknowledges that while proven offences by children have fallen, the remaining cohort presents a “crisis of complexity,” with 80% of cautioned or sentenced children having special educational needs.