DfE Guidance for ‘non-school’ Alternative Provisions
The new DfE Guidance for ‘non-school’ alternative provision.
The new guidance can be found here - read it but do come back for our thoughts and a couple of free audit tools to help you.
Firstly, ‘non-school’ AP rather than ‘unregistered’ has been used for the first time. Maybe that’s the beginning of a less negative approach to AP that doesn’t fit the criteria of registering as a school? That’s a positive thing.
Secondly, this may be voluntary guidance at the moment but the document signals that the DfE intends to legislate to introduce mandatory standards when parliamentary time allows. That’s great for providers – most I know will welcome standards and more legitimacy but it also gives a chance now to work to meet standards where they aren’t already in place. Far better than overnight legislation everyone suddenly has to meet.
The standards are guidance rather than a ‘must’ but it is hoped that local authorities will adopt them. I can see this happening for frameworks and QA but, I think will take some time for them to be adopted across the board. It probably depends on where your LA are in terms of frameworks and tendering windows as to how quickly you are expected to meet these standards. In reality they aren’t much different from standards already in place – it just may be helpful if LA’s become more consistent using these as a driver, particularly for those AP organisations that works across different authorities.
As expected the guidance is written with an expectation that all APs are working to reintegrate young people back into mainstream. Whilst we would all like to see young people thriving in mainstream the reality is that for some students AP will remain a destination. It is probably this group and the APs that work with the young people with the highest needs that will find this guidance the most challenging. There are some young people in the later stages of KS4 where reintegration is unlikely, there are also some young people who are waiting for places in specialist provision with no capacity There are also those who have missed out on EHCPs on their journey through education and will aways struggle to access mainstream but don’t carry with them the extra funding an EHCP can bring. We always want to have high expectations for all but also need to recognise that for some AP is a great destination that can be life-changing not an inferior outcome we can only allow to be temporary.
This guidance only applies to those who don’t meet the criteria for registering as a school. We’ve covered that elsewhere in other articles and our website points to the guidance available around this. In short, if you have 5 or more full-time students or 1 or more full-time EHCP or Looked After children then you must register. Full-time is classed as more than 18 hours or being the ‘main-place of education’ for children.
Lots of AP providers work with EOTAS students and guidance around how this is handled is deferred in the DfE’s document. Maybe something to be covered in the next white paper as the SEN system is looked at more widely? It can only be helpful for those who work with EOTAS pupils to make sure they are hitting these standards though. It’s very unlikely that work with students with EHCPs is going to be held to lower standards than outlined by the DfE here.
The guidance suggests that ‘non-school’ APs provide policies that demonstrate compliance with the standards and that these policies are made available, preferably via a website and should be available at all times. It also reminds commissioners about their responsibilities in both providing good information for APs but also being prepared to move a young person from an AP if it isn’t good enough.
I’d suggest that is is important for all ‘non-school’ APs to evaluate themselves against the standards and to work to strengthen any areas which they’d currently struggle to meet. As Close the Gaps we can offer an audit tool that is aligned with the standards you can download for free here. We’ve also complemented this with some pointers of what to look for (or develop) to evidence the framework.
If you want an independent view and an audit report based on the standards we can support you in this, both to do an audit but also to support you to then meet the standards and writing you a report for you to share with external commissioners around this – contact us here if you’re interested.
Give us a week or two and we’ll also have a package available online that takes our audit, adds helpful pointers and documents including compliant policies, referral forms, SLA’s and other paperwork which can help you become compliant quickly. Drop us an email if you’d like to be kept informed on when we release this.
