How are Virtual Schools currently supporting children in care across the primary to secondary transition years?
What is a Virtual School?
The Children and Families Act (2014) placed a statutory obligation on all local authorities to employ a Virtual School Headteacher. It is their role to champion the education of looked-after children in their authority's care as if they all attended a local school. In many areas there is now a team of other professionals employed to work within the Virtual School alongside the Virtual School Head to help raise looked-after children's educational attainment, monitor admissions, attendance and exclusions and give direct support where appropriate. However, there is no one model of a Virtual School and since the initial pilot of this role (Berridge et al 2009), there has been no attempt to begin to capture the national picture of the provision of Virtual Schools.
Survey of Virtual School Provision
To capture current provision, we invited Virtual Schools across England to describe the services and training in their local authority provided for looked-after children, their foster carers and schools, with a particular focus on provision across the broader school transition years for children aged 10 to 15. Althought the Virtual School's role is fundamentally educational in focus, they also have the potential to offer support with the broader factors that impact on attainment, such as attachment, social and emotional wellbeing, behaviour, peer relationships, foster placement stability, transition, family relationships and mental health. We therefore asked the focus of each provision with reference to these categories.
Twenty nine Virtual Schools responded and the services and training provided for schools, looked-after children and foster carers is detailed in the provision maps accessible from this page. Those Virtual Schools who have provided contact details are willing to provide further details of their service provision to faciliate the sharing of best practice. This piece of work is ongoing and we welcome other Virtual Schools to contact Helen Drew (helend@sussex.ac.uk), a researcher in CRESS lab, if they would like their current provision to be added to this website.
Research findings from the survey as a whole are currently being written up and will be shared on this page shortly.
Details of services being provided to foster carers can be found here: Services for foster carers [PDF 206.24KB]
Details of services being provided to looked-after children can be found here: Services for looked-after children [PDF 228.83KB]
Details of services being provided to schools can be found here: Services for schools [PDF 201.16KB]