Highlights from The Exam Man podcast Season 1, Episode 13
During Season 1 we were keen to explore access arrangements- a hugely important part of the exam system- and in particular in specialist settings, where access arrangements can be even more complex.
Headteacher Ruth McWeeney, who leads Social Arts for Education, a small and innovative independent special school for up to 25 children in London, opened her doors to us for our first live podcast interview. Following a recent flood, Ruth told us all about what it's like to run an incredibly special school- with an ambitious curriculum and full range of exams and access arrangements- with only one functioning classroom.....
Thank you so much for inviting us into your school, Ruth. Can you tell us a little about the students who attend?
Most of the kids are autistic but cognitively very, very able. They will have struggled in mainstream and were home-educated. Some of it was home education as a result of difficulties in mainstream. Some of the kids were home-educated purely by choice. Our actual primary criteria for admission were kids who'd been bullied. So that's what we were to start with. We didn't run any exams.
We just had small classes, an academic one in the morning and a therapeutic one in the afternoon. And then we decided to start running GCSEs, which we did in 2015 or 2016. And we only ran a couple initially- Maths, English, Science. It just grew from there- we started to get kids with EHCPs commissioned by local authorities when they had no places, they used us as an Alternative Provision. Eventually that became less of an option, as they wanted to move towards using registered provision only.
We therefore took the decision at that point to register as a school with Ofsted. And now the vast majority of our kids have been placed here on an EHCP. Again, they're academically very able. It's more social, emotional, mental health. The vast majority are autistic or have ADHD or both. But we take the kids that don't exhibit outwardly challenging behaviour- they might shut down and they won't explode in class. We don't stick them in GCSE sausage machine in Year 10 and go, you've got to be out of this by the end of Year 11. They start when they're ready, so some of them might do their GCSEs in Year 9. I think the youngest child actually that I ever put through a maths GCSE was 12 when she started. Some may not do a GCSE until they're 19. And that's not down to ability, it's down to missed school years. We don't get that many kids in Years 7 and 8, and we don't group by year anyway, we group by key stage because we've only got 25 places. With three rooms, we can't possibly have a classroom for every year group- so we have a loose key stage groups. But the majority of our kids will come to us in Year 9 and up, Year 10 most commonly, because what seems to be the pattern is they go to mainstream secondary, and they cope okay in Year 7. It starts to fall apart a bit in Year 8, they might start school refusing. And by the time they get to the end of Year 8, they've missed a significant chunk of school, the EHCP gets done, but then it doesn't work. And then they end up not able to get back into the mainstream setting and end up being placed here.
Therefore, by the time they come to us, a lot of our kids have missed upwards of two years of secondary education. We have to fill those gaps and get them as many qualifications as we can, get them out the other side, whilst allowing them to repair. So partly, one of the ways we do that is we might let them sit the same exam two, three seasons in a row. Because we're independent and we can't actually give them a ULN, it doesn't go on the database, so they can actually just have as many shots as they want.
You said there's 25 places available- how many children do you have at the school at the moment?
At the moment, 24. The majority of which are in key stage 4 and 5. Most of them didn't actually sit their GCSEs in Year 11. We gave them the opportunity. We waited for them to feel ready because we can't not give them the chance. We have to give them the chance.
How many staff do you have, Ruth?
We have 13. We have currently three learning sports assistants, one administrator/ exams officer/ part-time learning sports assistant, one teacher who only does intervention work and outreach work with children. And then we have a maths teacher, plus teacher who does science, history, cooking, and RE. We have our English teacher, we have somebody who teaches art and GCSE Psychology, and somebody else who runs all of the therapeutic classes and does the A-levels. We had to radically expand our timetable and our curriculum when we registered as a school because the expectations that we would provide a more balanced curriculum, we couldn't possibly do that with one academic lesson in the morning for each key stage group and one therapeutic class in the afternoon. We're currently running five streams, or we were until the flood in the front of the school.
We were running five streams in three rooms, which when everybody's on a full-time timetable, or at least being off at a full-time timetable if they're transitioning towards it, takes some managing. I think one of the things that we've always done here is just refuse to admit defeat and just be as imaginative as we can.
I'm sure you have to be so imaginative with the number of students you have and to accommodate the different needs?
The person who set this place up, she actually set it up for her son when he came out of mainstream school. I worked under her for many years, and she was incredibly imaginative. She would just have these ideas and I would think that that's never going to be possible. She would make it happen. And that's just sort of the philosophy of this place, that we just don't give up. We've heard our case officers say the same, that what they found when we've had the kids that are really hard to engage and hard to get into school is that we don't give up. You just keep trying. If this doesn't work, we'll just try something else.
When did you become the Headteacher, Ruth? You started here as a teacher, didn't you?
I started here as a Maths teacher, and became Deputy Headteacher in I think 2017. It was before we registered as a school and I've been Headteacher since 2021, so this is my third year of headship.
And you mentioned the flood that you had. So we're currently in your hall, which is one classroom basically, isn't it?
We had four rooms before that, including the staff room. And now we're all in one room. We've currently got the very lovely manager of the Conservative Club over the road allowing us to use his two upstairs rooms. So that's giving us temporary accommodation. When that's not quite enough, we've also got the church hall down at Christ Church. So, the kids are all over the place, but they're still in school. We've got some of them online because COVID taught us how to do that exceptionally well. And it's working. We do need the kids back in the building to get them out of their houses, to get them socializing again and to get their normality back. But hopefully things are going to be back to normal in a couple of weeks.
It wasn't an option to do anything else. We had two options when we lost the front of the building. One was to close, and one was to get on with it. And if we were going to choose the latter, we owed it to the kids who had worked so hard for the exams to make sure they could run. And we've had our JCQ inspection this year.
Do you know what I was thinking about, is where your secure storage is?
It's really small. It used to be in what is now our staff loo, but when officers came in, they said we needed a staff loo. Exams storage had to move. It's now a very small cupboard, but you can just about get in and close the door behind you.
So, Ruth, do you act as the exams officer?
I used to. I've passed that down now to one of my administrators because doing that as well as the headship is just too much. But I still oversee a lot of it. I mean, I was present for the whole of the JCQ inspection as well, just to give the exams officer a little bit of confidence because it was their first one. And for the first time in a while, we got all green ticks. This time there was nothing wrong. That was really good.
You talked about the students having a high cognitive ability- is that reflected in the types of qualifications that you offer as well?
We have been running BTECs, which are lovely, lovely courses from the perspective of our kids. Absolute nightmare that they're being phased out, because there isn't really much going in place of the Level 2 BTECs. The T-levels are great for Level 3 and up, but what about the kids for whom a Level 2 BTEC is a better option than a GCSE? Some of our kids are currently doing functional skills, not because they're not capable of doing GCSEs, but because they need the confidence that the functional skills exam will give them before they go on to the GCSE.
In terms of the rest of your curriculum, you were talking about therapeutic work. What does that involve?
We do various different things. We run group life skills lessons where they're learning to put flat back furniture together, and times when they're learning to order their own meal in a restaurant. We do group occupational therapy and group speech and language- we've been doing that in the form of drama rather than constantly putting therapy on the end of everything. The kids object to that, but then they also have individual SALT where that's in their EHCP, or frankly, if that's what they need. We also do other classes to support emotional regulation. Generally, we just try to help our kids to learn to handle the world so that when they leave here, they will cope.
The things our kids decide to do, to move on to, is not necessarily what they would have said that they were going to do when they started. It's lovely because we started to have our first few go to university, which is an amazing feeling. They came here with a massive gap in their education, having missed a lot of school, and not only now have enough qualifications to go on and do the next stage courses, but they also now have got the confidence to do it. I think the biggest thing for us is trying to instill that confidence, because ultimately if they leave here with nothing on paper, but the ability to go and do what they need to do elsewhere that's what we want.
Do you do outreach work as well?
Yes- when we've got someone who's still in the mainstream setting, that would be somebody who's potentially waiting placement here. We would do home visits then, or get them in for trial periods, depending on the child, if they're able to come through the door. We've got some children who are only taught at home. Some children have sessions at home to then support them being able to come in. It just varies on the needs of the child in question. We try to be as individual as we possibly can with what we offer them, but it's obviously limited by manpower.
You talked about the fact that you will often wait with a student until they're ready to go through the process. Does that drastically reduce then the anxiety around the exam, do you find? Or do you find that you're still dealing with quite a high level of anxiety around taking exams?
We still deal with quite a high level of anxiety around taking exams, but it's very rare that we have a child so anxious that they can't actually make it in. We always give them a backup option, even if the backup option saying to them 'you're already 16, you can re-sit this in November if you're not happy with your grade'. And we always say, this time's just a trial, so you can see what it's like- and we give them Haribo! It's always a very relaxed atmosphere, and we don't tend to use external invigilators. It can be very complicated, because we've still got to work within JCQ's rules. But we tend to, as far as we can, stick to centre staff for invigilation, because they're people that the kids are familiar with. We've set up a provision, which is like a morning school, so they'll come in from around 9am until 12.30pm. And there's usually about of 10 of them within this group of year 10 and 11. We start doing mock exams with them, where they don't have an invigilator, and then we sort of slowly introduce someone to them over the course of the year. Then, by the time we get there, they're familiar enough. If we've got a child who's particularly anxious and we've had a couple who would be so anxious they would really struggle to get out of the door, then I contact the boards and ask for a timetable variation. And often that's enough- just the knowledge that if they're a little bit late, they can still do their exam and their paper will still be accepted. We've also done home invigilation. That's, again, for a particularly anxious child who wasn't going to manage to come in. For us, it's just about finding the things that put that child on a level playing field. And if the child is taught at home, then they need to sit their exams at home. If they're taught one-to-one, they need to sit their exams one-to-one. If everything they are given work-wise is purple, then their exam paper needs to be purple.
I think one of the benefits of being so small, although we might have a cohort of six with between them about 40 access arrangements, it's much easier to manage than it would be for a cohort of 200. We can easily do the coloured paper without it becoming a huge logistical task!
Do you use computer readers and things like that?
We use NaturalReader where we're able to use computer readers for those children who need it. We always use Exam Write Pad for word processor exams as well. The majority of our kids will use a word processor for their exams. Either because of physical dexterity, motor skills problems or executive dysfunction. It's supervised rest breaks and word processor pretty much universally. We've only got such a small number of kids. They have a pencil case with two very sharp pencils, two definitely working biros, a sharpener, a rubber, and they've got a ruler. Maths equipment if they're doing a maths exam, a calculator. They also have a little key ring, which has got three cards on it, one of which is their exam desk card with their details on. And then there's a break card, which says I need a break, and I'm finishing my break. Those are always at the ready, so they can just hold up their break card when they want a break, wait for the invigilator to acknowledge it, and then hold up the, I'm done, I'd like to restart card. That means as well that when we've got kids who've got issues with other people using their stuff, nobody else is getting that child's pack of exam things because it's got their name on it.
I'm all for controlling those small things!
To listen to and read more interviews like this, subscribe to The Exam Man - the #1 podcast about exams and assessment
To find out more about Examscreen please contact us: Examscreen