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School Focused Section

School Focused Teams

Welcome to the School Focus section

Here you can find information about the School Focused Teams, the School Focus Groups, links to useful documents, and national websites. Walsall Children's Services has embarked upon a major programme of change to reform the delivery of services and develop partnerships with schools and Head teachers. The formation of the School Focused Teams and new school groupings known as School Focus Groups (SFG) was a central plank of Serco's proposal that is now embedded in the contract to manage the Education services in Walsall. Walsall Children's Services is committed to providing quality education and lifelong learning opportunities to all parts of Walsall.

We believe education is the foundation of a prosperous and healthy society and a dynamic economy and we in Walsall Children's Services believe that providing better services via the School Focused Teams means better experiences for the schools, Head teachers, teachers, pupils and parents.

The development of School Focus Groups, supported by School Focused Teams, is a major strand of the contract for the delivery of Education Services in Walsall. This approach to service delivery is gaining momentum nationally, as one of the most effective ways of delivering high quality, coherent and coordinated services to schools and the individual children and young people within them.

The aims of this approach in Walsall are to:

  • Enable effective communication with schools through information, consultation and representation - utilising the Focus Groups to bring together the leaders of a large number of schools into smaller groupings, to ensure that all are involved in debate, consultation and dissemination of information; and to put in place structures which will support the representation of their views on a number of wider decision making and strategic forums.
  • Further develop and strengthen partnership working between schools and the Education services by taking communication, consultation and representation down to a smaller group level, and giving continuity and consistency in the education service personnel, a greater sense of ownership, involvement and spirit of partnership can further develop and flourish.
  • More effectively manage and support times of transition for children and young people in education. If there is a geographical link between partners, as is the case in Walsall, familiarity with more staff, working practices and better informed relationships can ease the issues around transition from one school to another, or from one phase to another, both from individual children and young people's perspective, and their families.

    Improve the quality of services delivered to, and individual outcomes for children and young people and their families. As mentioned above, a team involving a range of different professionals, who are pooling their time, knowledge and expertise to work together for a common goal - will be stronger and more effective, with better targeting of resources to identified needs, and greater support for a holistic response.

  • Further support the development of effective self managing schools by moving to a consultation style of service delivery, a culture of developing shared skills, knowledge and expertise through focused self review is promoted. This more effectively supports improving quality through organisational and individual self review, and places greater value on using the skills, knowledge and expertise already held by staff in schools. Decisions about the targetting and use of external support are controlled by the results of self review, demonstrating a culture of learning, moving and self managing organisations.

    • It is very important to establish a common language to describe the service we are delivering:

    Collaboratives- The two larger groupings of schools that are formed from a number of the School Focus Groups (SFG's). Every maintained school in the borough is in either collaborative A or B.

    School Focus Group - The smaller and more localised grouping of schools who are coming together to share and discuss issues, form views. These will generally be the service delivery groupings against which Walsall Children's Services staff are deployed through School Focused Teams.

    School Focused Teams - The term used here is to describe the members of individual services who are allocated to a particular group of schools (SFG), and who will come together to work as a multi-professional team to support the school. The use of Focused instead of Focus is deliberate, and intended to describe the action that the team will undertake that will be 'Focused' on the school.

    School Focus Group Coordinator - This is the nominated lead School Improvement Adviser for each of the School Focus Groups. This person will coordinate regular meetings of the Headteachers/representatives from a particular SFG, to undertake consultation and information dissemination between Walsall Children's Services and schools. They will be the main channel for data collection, information sharing, target setting and action planning, for Walsall Children's Services' support for whole school improvement. They will not determine the allocation of time from different professional services to the SFG or individual schools, this is a matter for the manager of that team, but they will broker the need for additional support time over and above the professional allocations, if it is identified that there are particular issues arising in individual schools.

    What does a School Focused Team look like and how will it work?

    A) When a group of professionals with different skills, experiences, knowledge and personalities comes together to focus on one or more issues, they are acting in the same way as a School Focused Team. An easy parallel to draw is with the "team around the child" approach where professionals work together to plan and support a child with additional needs. Sometimes the team may be small, sometimes it may be large, and it depends on the needs of the child.

    B) The first stage of team action is a sharing of professional knowledge and information, to give a holistic and inclusive view of the client needs. It is usually the case that after the professional dialogue has taken place, members of the team then assume different roles and carry out coordinated action to maximise the effectiveness of the support delivered. Having had the professional dialogue, the team are all involved in and aware of the action being taken and their role in supporting it. The team then keep in touch on the issue, updating each other as necessary, and then will meet again to review progress and plan any further action if any is required.

    C) This approach can be used to deliver support to any issue that might arise from leadership and management of the school, to improving support for an individual child with SEN. The membership and expertise of the team will be dependent on the areas of focus and the potential job to be done.

    To successfully plan and implement this approach, we need to break it down into stages and identify the issues that we need to address and clarify at each stage to arrive at a universally adopted and consistently applied model

    Stages of working as part of a School Focused Team

    Stage 1 - Individual Preparation

  • Recognising different roles and responsibilities
  • Subscribing to the aims and outcomes of the approach

    • Stage 2 - Sharing data, knowledge and information

  • Protocols and expectations, what we can and can't do
  • Understanding purpose, confidentiality, transparency and objectivity.

    • Stage 3 - Summarising and drawing conclusions

  • Using evidence to inform
  • Instinct v Objectivity

    • Stage 4 - Action Planning

  • The responsibilities of collective action and team working
  • Systems for allocating time and resources

    • Stage 5 - Implementation and Communication

  • Systems for keeping in touch
  • Agreements for making changes

    • Stage 6 - Reviewing, evaluating and revising

  • The review process - timing, preparation and expectations
  • Evaluating outcomes - celebrating success and learning from failure
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