The Base That Aims To Empty Itself

Where we started

We are a small secondary school of around 850 pupils, and we did not set out to open a secondary inclusion base. We did not even know that was what we had built until someone told us that is what it is called.

Let me give you the context, because it matters. We are a local authority school with a high proportion of pupils with SEND. Our EHCPs have grown from 37 to 60, which is too much growth too quickly for the systems and the paper trail behind them. More than half of our pupils with SEND are also eligible for free school meals, so the crossover of multiple vulnerabilities is high. We also had a Requires Improvement judgment.

And we sit among eight secondary schools in a very small area, where families often move a child from one school to the next. So as heads, we work closely together, because these children cross all our paths.

The problem that hit home

We had a growing issue with truancy around the site. Children were coming into school but not going to lessons.

Here is the irony. They were not causing trouble. They would sit at a picnic bench and have a chat with you. They simply did not want to be in lessons. At one point there were 141 of them, and most had SEND. In fact, 68 per cent of our suspensions that year were pupils with SEND.

It was when we counted the lost learning hours that it truly landed. Those 141 children lost more than 21,000 learning hours over a single year. That is a staggering amount of childhood to lose.

Great teaching first

Like others working in this space, we spent a long time making sure our universal provision, what we call our great teaching, was right before anything else.

We got real staff buy-in. Our professional development included staff delivering 20-minute lessons to other staff, so a teacher would move from a Spanish lesson to a maths lesson to an English lesson, and feel again what it is like to be a Year 9 child put on the spot. It picked out good practice, and it reminded everyone what the classroom feels like from a pupil's seat.

But here is the thing about improving teaching. The better it gets, the more clearly it exposes the needs of the children who still cannot access it. So we had to build around it.

A place to take a breath

Our first space was a small room off the hub, which the children promptly nicknamed the Hubbard, because it is the cupboard off the hub.

Since Covid, we had more children who felt anxious and struggled to cope with a full 60-minute lesson. The Hubbard gave them somewhere to go for a few minutes, in a time-limited way, to take a breather and then return to class. It let us tell the difference between a child who genuinely needed two minutes and a child who was starting to slip away altogether.

What I love is that, as our teaching improved and children grew in confidence, it has been used less and less. That is exactly what we want.

Alongside it we run Forest School, and a Gateway provision, a primary-style classroom led by a primary practitioner that helps our most vulnerable Year 7s bridge the gap from Year 6, with that lead practitioner also going out to support subject teachers.

The Cove

The provision I most want to tell you about is the Cove, which used to be the old caretaker's house.

We had children becoming school refusers, because their entire experience of school had become us chasing them around. I joked in our weekly updates that we had senior leaders in orange jackets doing little more than trying to drag children into lessons they would leave 30 seconds later.

So we stopped, and we asked them what was not working. When you ask, the answer is clear. They do not feel they belong. Every school is talking about belonging, and these children do not feel it. What they do belong to is the little group of children who truant together. That is a sense of belonging, just not the one we want for them.

So we set out to build them somewhere to belong, and that became the Cove.

What we did not expect was that the parents wanted to come too. Many children were not coming in because their parents were anxious about school as well. The beauty of an old house is that it has a kitchen, so a parent could sit and have a cup of tea while their child learned nearby. For some families, that anxiety was far bigger than we had realised.

We started with a sofa and a familiar face. We tried buying in online tutoring, but it was extraordinarily expensive, so we scrapped it and used our own qualified teacher instead. Then we did the thing that matters most. We had our own teachers, trained in our own great teaching, going over to the Cove to teach. That link back to the main school is everything, and the staff enjoyed it.

The results speak for themselves. There are 18 children in the Cove, and their average attendance rose by around 24 percentage points in a year. When you start from a very low base, that is enormous. We use EHCP funding to support it, and we supplement their curriculum with college courses, motor vehicle, health and social care, which gives them a real bridge into post-16.

One thing we learned early. When we baselined these children, their average reading age was 8.7 years. Why would we expect them to walk into a mainstream lesson and cope? Reading intervention had to come first.

What the numbers show

Across the school, the direction of travel is clear. Negative incidents down. Truancy down. Internal exclusions down. Detentions down. Suspensions down. A 57 per cent reduction in lost learning hours.

I will be honest about the money, because you should be. I was already spending around £62,000 a year on commissioned alternative provision. Running the Cove, the Hub and Forest School now costs us more, around £97,000. But I can justify every penny, because it is my staff, my curriculum, my control, and it is still part of my school. I know exactly what is being delivered, and to whom.

What I would tell you

If I had listened to Katherine Walsh four years ago rather than hearing it here in retrospect, I would have saved myself some pain. So let me pass on five things.

If you have no plan, do not bother. Make sure you have a qualified teacher. Be clear about your success criteria. Measure session attendance, what is happening in your base, rather than only the headline figure. And build the culture and the character first.

Two more reflections. Get your entry and exit points right, and know what the curriculum for each child actually looks like, or it all sounds a little wishy-washy. And marry your school systems across both sites, because a child who transitions back into a mainstream lesson and hits the old behaviour policy head-on is straight back to square one.

We have not got it all right. Our parent and pupil voice is still not where I want it, and we have not yet moved a child all the way from the Cove back into full mainstream. But it is far better than it was.

My true north is always the children. The word fun should count for more than it does. And our ultimate goal is a base that empties itself, because if we have got it right, the children will no longer need it. Then we will find the next group who do, and we will start again. That is the job, and it keeps us creative.

If these children really did not want to be here, they would have stopped turning up altogether. They kept coming back. So there was always something here worth coming back to. We just had not made it right for them yet.

Mike Hartnell is Headteacher of Warblington School in Havant.