Education

Looking after children can be tough at times and can feel even harder if you aren’t supported with their educational needs. Any parent who has fought to get a child an educational health care plan or struggled to get a school to understand trauma related behaviours will understand how exhausting it can feel, especially if you are battling alone. There is also a strong link between contextual safeguarding concerns such as criminal exploitation, gang activity, radicalisation and online abuse and children who struggle in school and have poor educational achievement.

That's why our education and engagement team came to be. At The Hazel Project, we want our foster parents to be able to provide the very best care to their young people and we recognise that expert support to navigate the education system and understand the vulnerabilities of our children due to their difficult pasts can be really helpful.

Carol and Vicky, who head up the team, work with our foster parents and young people to improve educational outcomes and keep them safe. They monitor the attendance and progress of all of our school age children and young people and work closely with foster parents, fostering supervisors, the child's social worker, schools and virtual schools to ensure that our children and young people are given the opportunities that they deserve to achieve the best possible outcomes from their time in education. They each bring a wealth of experience to their roles, having worked in the education sector for many years and are introduced to our children and young people when they arrive with Hazel Project foster families so that relationships can be nurtured from the onset and organise a range of activities to keep young people engaged and provide them opportunities for fun and growth.

Carol or Vicky attend statutory education meetings for our families' children wherever possible and often attend the various non statutory meetings too. These include personal education plan meetings, annual reviews, exclusion meetings, reintegration meetings and transition meetings. They often undertake return interviews following any episodes of a young person having been missing.

Carol is our Safeguarding and Education Maven. Her specialisms include safeguarding, child sexual exploitation awareness and child criminal exploitation awareness. Carol works directly with our young people on a 1:1 basis, educating them to enable them to keep themselves safe. Carol also offers age appropriate group sessions, including the promotion of early safer internet knowledge for those aged 7-10.

Vicky is our Education and Special Educational Needs Maven. She also recently gained a degree in childhood studies with educational needs as a specialism. Vicky also works directly with our young people, concentrating on emotional resilience and suggesting strategies to support them to manage their emotions both in and out of school.

Training For Foster Parents

Carol and Vicky run education awareness training for foster parents which covers;

School admissions
Personal education plans
Statutory education meetings
Working together
Additional learning needs
Understanding levels and achievements - CATS/SATS/GCSE LEVELS/BTECS/T LEVELS
Exclusions - policies and procedures
Funding - pupil premium and bursaries
Apprenticeships and supported internships

Training for Young People

Carol and Vicky run training for young people including;

Child Sexual Exploitation
Anti-Radicalisation
TAMS (The Amazing Me) - emotional resilience
Promotion of safer internet use

It’s really important that we gain the views of our young people and Carol and Vicky can then ensure that their voices are heard. The education team hold;

Young peoples forum groups - to discuss topics that may have been raised by other young people, staff or foster parents. They can also gather ideas for events and get young people’s views on what is working well or could be improved.

Questionnaires - our annual young person questionnaire helps us to gather children’s views on their home, the events that we run, what is going well in their lives and anything that could be better. These are always carried out by our young people who call each family to speak to their foster children.
Rate my stay - after any period of respite fostering with another family, the education team call the young person to ask about their stay.
Sons & daughters groups - we meet regularly with sons & daughters of our families to gather their views about fostering. This gives them the chance to talk to others in fostering families and get support with anything that they may be finding challenging.
1:1 - some of our fostered children are not able to communicate verbally or over struggle with talking on the telephone, for these young people we have developed a variety of forms to aid communication using pictures and symbols. Their feedback is gathered face to face, in an environment that they feel comfortable.

Children Events

Throughout the year Carol and Vicky organise and attend our children’s events. Some events we have held recently include;

Our annual trip to the pantomime
Pool parties and barbeques
Halloween events - pumpkin carving, arts and crafts and special effects workshops
Easter events - easter egg hunts and crafts
Pamper days
Football workshops
Dance workshops
Beach hut days

Young People with Additional Needs

There are around 1.4 million children with a special education need (SEN) in England, many of whom may also have a disability. Schools are expected to make reasonable adjustments for these young people. We also aim to make reasonable adjustments to enable us to be fully inclusive of the young people and consider ways in which we can support them and gather their feedback to hear their voice.

Independence Programme

Our “working towards independence” programme is designed to support each young person to have some knowledge and understanding of how to look after themselves and keep themselves safe to prepare them for adulthood. Goals are set by ? and support is given wherever needed, to help young people to achieve their outcomes. Checklists are shared with young people and their foster parents to aid them in achieving independent living skills.

There are no set timescales for this to be completed, each young person will work through at their own pace. Activity days are held throughout the year to help children to achieve some of the modules such as first aid training, fire safety workshops and cookery workshops.

The education team is an integral part of the Hazel Projects wraparound support services and one of the many reasons why the children cared for by our foster parents are able to thrive.