the educator mag May 24 (1) - Flipbook - Page 22
VIRTUAL SCHOOLS – IMPROVING OUTCOMES FOR CHILDREN LOOKED AFTER
Monitoring the school attendance and PEPs of children looked after
is a requirement of every council. Virtual schools play a vital role.
The personal education plan (PEP) and
attendance monitoring of children looked
after (CLA) are vital in ensuring that they
are being appropriately provisioned for
and educated. The PEP ensures that their
education is on the right track; attendance
monitoring provides robust information
as to their whereabouts for five days of
the week, placed in or out of area. Such
information is important to schools, local
authorities, social and care workers and
other professionals involved in their
journey. Monitoring and provision of the
information is the responsibility of the
child’s local authority, their corporate
parent. But how can this information be
seamlessly gathered, recorded and shared
across all relevant parties to the ultimate
benefit of each child?
Real-time virtual school monitoring
Having attendance information in real-time
is a clear advantage. Where information
takes time to filter through, vital
intervention opportunities can be lost.
In a manual world, where information is
discovered twice daily by phoning the
school the child attends, the data takes
time to filter through the system to reach
decision makers.
Each local authority will have its own plan
of action for CLA found to not be attending
school. With real-time data, actions can be
implemented at exactly the right moment.
Equally, monitoring each PEP is crucial in
ensuring that each child is receiving the
educational opportunities deemed
necessary at the outset of their journey.
If targets are not being met, it is the role of
the corporate parent to step in and find out
why. This can only be done with up-to-date
information.
Sharing virtual school information
There are often multiple agencies involved
in the journey of CLA. It is, therefore,
important that the information is made
available to them. Any education welfare,
social care or youth justice workers will
need the information to create their own
holistic view of the child and inform their
own responses to their story.
Information becoming siloed only acts
to the detriment of the child. Technology
can certainly help, but it can also hinder.
Interoperability of software is important in
improving outcomes.
Attendance and PEP data can be useful to
other agencies in the same way that
information from them can be useful to
the corporate parent. Disparate agencies
working to the same goal of improving
outcomes for vulnerable children will do
just that.
Securing virtual school data
Recording attendance and PEP data is
one thing, but how will the information
be secured and shared? Working with a
trusted technology partner is an
important part of the process. Ensuring
relevant security certificates are achieved
and that the process is in place to record
and make the data available to relevant
colleagues and third parties.
What will this process look like? Handling
sensitive data is a complex issue, so
breaking through this complexity and
making life easy for your school, local
authority and associated parties is
beneficial. IMPULSE Nexus features
accessible portals through which only
relevant data is shared with only relevant
parties. There are school, parent,
professional and provider portals.
Data is input once, then can be redacted
and shared with others. Rules for what data
can be shared with whom are established
at the outset and can be altered as
necessary as you go, with the ability to
manually override.
Getting virtual schools right with
IMPULSE Nexus from CACI
CACI has designed IMPULSE Nexus to be
modular and interoperable. Our virtual
schools module can be used in isolation
and plugged into the rest of your software
solutions to provide a complete picture.
You can use as much or as little of IMPULSE
Nexus as you need.
Our Core record enables you to record
all PEP and attendance data in one place
against a child’s record. When certain
criteria aren’t met, e.g. they’ve missed a set
number of am/pm attendances, alerts can
be raised in the system to notify relevant
people, removing the manual strain.
Once the process is established, the
data is recorded at source in schools and
uploaded in real-time to the children’s
records. You can edit and adapt the rules
underlining this process as you need going
forward. Our team is always on hand to
help.
Getting the virtual schools process right
is fundamental to improving outcomes for
CLA. Receiving data late, misinterpreting
it and missing intervention opportunities
make a difficult task and impossible one.
Having a system and process in place
that facilitates swift and efficient PEP and
attendance monitoring will help schools,
authorities and children across the UK.
For more info visit IMPULSE Nexus…
