Christ’s College takes new approach to understanding what holds students back
Assess not Assume project is supported by a £137,272 grant from SHINE Sunderland
With support from the SHINE Sunderland fund, Christ’s College is taking a new approach to understanding the barriers affecting students’ attendance, learning and future opportunities.
At the school in Pennywell, Sunderland, staff know that every student’s circumstances are different. But when a young person struggles with attendance, behaviour or attainment, the reasons are not always clear.
The new Assess not Assume project, supported by a £137,272 grant from the SHINE Sunderland fund, aims to change that. Over the next two years, Christ’s College will work with students and their families to understand their experiences, identify barriers to learning and connect them with appropriate support.
The college’s Principal, Julie Normanton, explained: “It’s about deeply understanding barriers, because so much of what we do in school otherwise is based on the assumptions we make. For example, when a child doesn’t attend, we assume we understand why they’re not attending and we put things in place to try and address that issue. But if we don’t understand the barrier they are facing, we’re not going to fix it and we’ll throw the wrong solution at it.”
Christ’s College has made progress in recent years, moving from a ‘Requires Improvement’ Ofsted rating to ‘Good’ and reducing its attainment gap. However, like many schools, attendance, aspiration and achievement remain significant challenges.
Almost a third of secondary students are persistently absent, rising to 52.8% among those eligible for Pupil Premium. Meanwhile, some students with no identified vulnerabilities have poor attendance, while others facing multiple vulnerabilities attend regularly.
These patterns show why attendance data alone cannot explain what is happening in students’ lives.
The project builds on the school’s experience of Thrive, a SHINE-supported programme addressing social, emotional and mental health needs. While Thrive has had significant impact in helping students facing particular challenges, not every difficulty is linked to mental health.
“That’s only one pathway because it’s not always mental health that’s the barrier for every child,” said Julie.
Assess not Assume will look more broadly, identifying barriers that might otherwise go unrecognised and establishing what support is needed.
The first stage will involve recruiting inclusion support staff to work alongside students and their families. As well as speaking to families in school, the team will work in the local community, including at Pennywell Community Centre, and through home visits where appropriate.
Building trust will be central to this work, particularly where families may feel uncomfortable discussing personal difficulties with school staff or professional services.
Julie said: “I’ve not walked in the shoes of these children and their families. I can’t assume that I understand how that barrier is going to impact on them unless I really take that time to find out.”
The school has recruited people with strong local connections. One appointed staff member is a parent at the school, lives in the community and knows many local families. The other was born and raised in Pennywell, is now raising his own family here and has worked for a number of years in pastoral work. Both care deeply about young people and improving their life chances.
These local relationships will help staff ask questions in a way that feels more accessible to families and build a fuller picture of the challenges students face.
Assess not Assume will run in two connected stages.
The first will focus on diagnostic assessment: listening to students and families, understanding their circumstances and identifying existing support that could help. Where needs cannot currently be met, the school will carry out a gap analysis to establish what additional provision is required.
The second stage will involve working with external partners to develop and implement personalised support programmes. These could address a range of barriers, including attendance, family circumstances, aspirations and engagement with education.
The school is already an active member of the SHINE-funded Pennywell Fellowship, which connects families with local services through the Family Champions project.
“When we’ve completed the listening piece, the inclusion support worker will goto the family champion and share the problem, asking what support services they can recommend.”
This approach will help ensure that support is based on what students and their families actually need, rather than a predetermined response. It recognises that there are a plethora of organisations already in existence in the community; we don’t want to duplicate their work, but partner with them to ensure that support is accessible to those who need it.
For Julie, the project is about more than improving attendance figures or examination results. It is about helping young people remain engaged with school, overcome difficulties and have better opportunities in the future.
She wants families to understand that the school’s interest extends beyond academic performance:
“We care about them and we want life to be better for their children.”
By identifying and addressing barriers earlier, the school hopes to improve attendance, behaviour and attainment, while reducing the risk of students becoming disengaged from education or moving between schools.
The project will be evaluated throughout its first stage, allowing Christ’s College to refine its approach and identify which forms of support are most effective. The school hopes to develop a framework that can eventually be shared with other schools across Sunderland.
The success of Thrive has already led to knowledge-sharing with other Sunderland secondary schools. Assess not Assume offers another opportunity for schools to learn collectively about the barriers students face and how they can respond.
Of the SHINE Sunderland fund, Julie said: “Particularly for a small school, the amount of investment that’s coming through this fund is life changing because we couldn’t invest fully in this work on our own with our budget.
“I wouldn’t be able to do this in-depth work without it. So it has been really significant for us and allowed us to build a strong sense of belonging with our children and to understand the complexity of their lives.
“Schools are naturally very competitive because we’re judged against each other and we are all programmed to want to do better than our neighbouring schools. And SHINE Sunderland has really knocked that on the head. It’s recognising that we all want to do the best for these children and that’s why we’re in the profession. So why are we fighting against each other? Why are we not sharing our good practise and collaborating and working together rather than working on things in isolation?
“So it’s about working smarter, but it’s also about sharing excellent practice where it exists so that we all benefit from that, and it’s not just contained within our four walls. And that’s the way that it should be.
“We should want every child who lives in Sunderland to have a good deal. It shouldn’t matter which school they go to.”