After over a decade of relationship building and engaging in important conversations within the Beneficial Area, John Lyon’s Charity understood that partnering with Virtual Schools was the best way of ensuring that funding reached those who needed it most.
A Virtual School is a team inside a local authority whose remit is to support the educational attainment of Children Looked After within that local authority area. They support young people in the care system, track their education attainment and offer additional opportunities around their education, personal growth and mental health where possible. It is well-known that Children Looked After in the UK consistently have lower attainment levels and worse life-chances than their peers. They are a priority group for John Lyon’s Charity but finding mechanisms for funding to reach them has not always been easy. Working directly with the Virtual Schools in the Beneficial Area proved to be an efficient way of benefiting some of society’s most challenged young people and over the past ten years we have honed this offer to create The Enrichment Project. The core goal of this initiative was to enhance capacity within the Virtual Schools to help them maximise the funding opportunities available from John Lyon’s Charity.
The Virtual School initiative has encouraged the local authorities to work together to maximize resources and has provided a wide variety of activities for children and young people to access. This partnership approach has not only led to more activities happening but it has also enabled the Virtual Schools to benefit from being part of a network that they can learn from and share learning. To date, John Lyon’s Charity has awarded £805,765 towards enrichment coordination and activities.
By working with the Virtual School in the Tri-Borough (Kensington & Chelsea, Hammersmith & Fulham and Westminster), it was evident that having the post of Enrichment Coordinator added additional capacity across those three geographical areas, enabling them to offer a wider variety of opportunities for the young people within their remit. The other Virtual Schools in the Charity’s Beneficial Area (Barnet, Brent, Ealing and Harrow) did not have this coordinated function and so found it more difficult to take up funding opportunities offered by the Charity. An unusual step for a funder, John Lyon’s Charity created a consultancy role, known as the Enrichment Coordinator, to replicate the model in the Tri-Borough, to work across these four local authority areas. This was no mean feat, with safeguarding being the main concern. Each of the local authorities could see the added value of having this additional post so went to great lengths to ensure that the Enrichment Coordinator was set up safely and securely and had access to the right data in order to perform effectively.
This was a leap of faith, not only for John Lyon’s Charity but also for the Virtual Schools themselves who entrusted the Enrichment Coordinator to work on their behalf. The success of this initiative is largely down to Bernadette Alexander, who is the Enrichment Coordinator across the Virtual School initiative. Having previously been a Virtual School Head in the Charity’s Beneficial Area, and known to the Virtual Schools in the initiative, she was able to capitalise on these relationships and reap some very positive results in a short space of time.
The vast majority of Bernadette’s work is in developing relationships with various organisations that deliver activities for young people, providing both training on how best to work with Children Looked After (CLA) as well as evaluate the success of each programme with recommendations on how to improve. She liaises with the Virtual Schools to ensure activities are of the right quality and standard, are what the young people themselves want to do and recruits young people to take up the places. Working across multiple boroughs means that activities can be shared across the four areas, and each local authority does not have the responsibility of recruiting enough young people for the entire programme.
Over ten years, John Lyon’s Charity has grown relationships with the Virtual School heads, establishing a number of grants and partnerships under the Enrichment Project to ensure that children and young people have access to a rich variety of cultural and enrichment activities. The Virtual Heads, Enrichment Coordinator and representatives from John Lyon’s Charity meet regularly to ensure the Enrichment Project is running to its fullest potential, reinforcing the importance of partnership.
The project’s success so far has come down to the personalities of the people involved (as with any initiative), who have seen the potential to build bridges between local authorities and to share knowledge, resources and ideas, always with the benefits to their young people at the forefront of their minds.
Bridie McDonagh Head Teacher, Ealing Virtual School, Looked After Children Head of Behaviour Strategy and Inclusion said;
The Enrichment Programme and support we have been able to offer our looked after children and care leavers through the JLC grant activities over the last two years is second to none. With JLC support over time for Ealing’s Looked After Children and more recently in the last two years coordinated and facilitated by Bernadette Alexander, Ealing Council and our partner boroughs in this programme have been able to offer a substantial and enormously enriching experience to a highly vulnerable group of children and young people in care.
The JLC grant funding supports our Virtual School’s goal to raise attainment, ensure good progress and enable access to education. The enrichment programme is a key part in supporting engagement in education, training and employment and the ultimate Ealing Council Children’s Services goal of increasing life chances for care leavers.
The JLC grant programme has allowed us to develop excellent partners in delivery; many top in their fields and sharing our aspirational vision of accessing a diverse group of young people to a wide range activities that they might never experience in their lives. All of this has impact for school progress and stability for our children and young people in care.