Transcript

Good evening and welcome to this evening's Children's Services Scruti Subcommittee meeting. I am Councillor David Oxley, Chair of the Subcommittee. This meeting is being recorded and being broadcast live. In the event that technical issues require the meeting to be adjourned and it cannot be restarted within a few minutes, further updates will be posted on the Council's democracy X, formerly Twitter account, which is at LBL democracy. Please note that the Council has a duty to protect sensitive personal data. To ensure such information is not inadvertently disclosed, would you please avoid using full names or any of the details that may reveal the personal identity of others. If we have gone to health and safety housekeeping, there were no tests, not surprisingly, there were no tests planned for this evening. Fire exits, exit the room from either door there and then go up the stairs to street level where there's an exit. Toilets. Toilets. Toilets. Toilets. Toilets. Toilets. Toilets there is. an accessible toilet. Just outside the right hand side of the room from the public's direction. That would be from my left hand side. Basically that way. Apologies. I have received apologies from councillor Christine Banton and councillor Ibtisan Adem is a substitute. I've also more recently received apologies from councillor Rina. I don't think we've got a substitute for her. Now kicking things off. Handy if we could just sort of quickly introduce each other and at the same time say whether you actually have got a pecuniary interest to declare on any item in tonight's agenda. Assuming you've all read the agenda for tonight so I can start off on this side just basically say who you are, you represent and then whether you've got any pecuniary interest. Dominic Armstrong, Streatham Cumberland Vale, no particular interests. I'm Catherine Matthew Grant, councillor for Streatham Hill West and Thornton Ward. I would clearly interest in a Governor at King's Avenue School which is actually one of the schools affected by identified people place planning. not pecuniary. Not pecuniary. I was going to say that would be a non pecuniary. Non pecuniary. Yeah, but always useful to do that. Yeah. That's my question too. So I'm Will Garud, representative from the Church England. I'm the Chair of Governors of St Actuaries in, well not directly affected but obviously not poorly affected by that item as well. OK, thank you. I'm James Bryan, councillor for Brixton North. I'm James Bryan, councillor for Brixton North. I know pecuniary interest in that. Councillor Adam, you've now pecuniary interest as well. Thanks very much. Next, we move to the minutes of the previous meeting of the subcommittee held on the 10th of October 2024. Oh, quite a long time ago. These are set out in the agenda pack pages one to six. Copy here. For someone, no amendments have been requested to democratic services. I wasn't there so I'm not going to oppose them or anything like that. I think it was chaired by Sir James Bryan. We've got anyone who wishes to actually propose that they are agreed. Acclamation there. Now we move on. Oh, could I just say before we start there as well that the Cabinet member, for most of all of the items tonight, Councillor Ben Kind has just sent apologies for lateness. He's actually in another councillor duty event and he thinks he'll be slightly late. So you may find he just walks into the room in a few minutes or something like that, but we'll carry on anyway. And if we've got any questions, particularly whatever we want to direct to him, we will save them for when he arrives if that's OK. So now we move on to the core business for tonight's meeting. The first substantial item on tonight's agenda is the Ofsted report item three on the published agenda pack. It's on pages seven to 17. We would normally steer from the Cabinet Member Children and Families Council of n kind, but I propose that we go straight to an officer. Mr. Andrew Carter is not available this evening, but he's ably stood in for by Mr. Beelby. Thank you. Thank you. I'm really keen to do the introduction to this item because it is actually, I've read it myself and all the rest of it, a really piece of good news. Is it over to me? OK, I'll just introduce myself for those who don't know me. I think most of you do, but I'm Bob Beelby. I'm the director for Children's Social Care. And again, I'm covering tonight for Andrew Carter. So I'm assuming everybody would have read the report, so I'm just going to talk from it. And can I just say, just so you're aware, I've just I go off screen. I I I have visual impairment, so I've got I use a system just so it configures for me. So just bear with me. I'll I'll read out and then obviously if anybody wants to ask any questions, please come back to me. So don't think I'm rude if I'm staring at my screen, but some I'll start. So again, just let me go back. I've just left it just has to slightly configure for me. OK, so again, some context. As you're aware, Ofsted conducted a focus visit on the 27th and 28th of June 2023. The inspectors reviewed arrangement for children in need and children on the child protection plan. The comments for the inspection team have been captured on the roadmap to excellence. The Ofsted annual engagement meeting took place on the 4th of April. And sorry, mine's just going down and I'm now going to really just talk about the Ofsted focus visit, which was on the 2nd and 3rd of December 24. And for those who aren't aware that although they come in those two days, they actually do a lot of work. We have to do a lot of preparation for them and provide them with information a week prior to that. And then they come in and undertake again what they're looking at the arrangements for children in need and child protection. They met with social workers to evaluate the experiences and progress for disabled children, children subject to child in need and protection planning and the quality of practice with children subject to public law outline. The inspectors also reviewed the impact of local authorities performance management and quality assurance activity in driving improvement. Sorry. So I'm just going to now go through just these each edit and I said I'm. I'll try and keep it as brief as I can, but I I just think it's it, you know, it it's worth just laying them out, set out. So support for children, families, child in need and child protection plans. The inspectors found that social workers have a better understand of risk for children and young people and that child protection strategy meets are convened swiftly with a good range of partners in attendance. Child and family assessments are increasingly comprehensive and of a good quality with the best examples shown a good understanding of risk and harm. Children and parents views are taken into account. Excuse me. When writing child in need and child protection plans interpreters are consistently used ensuring that families. or sorry that the family can be affected partners in improving outcomes for children. Significant improvements have been made in the arrangement to progress plans for children in the preceding stage of the public law outline, which. In brackets is PLO. Previous concerns by judiciary about non compliance with court directed orders have been addressed support for children with complex needs. Just one minute. Just one minute. I'll just go. Move my screen. OK. Transformation for service for children with disabilities into the 025 disability service include an adult social care team has vastly improved services for disabled children. Assessment plans and visits are timely and meaningful support for children who are vulnerable to risk outside the home. Social workers are managed to identify risks for children and young people. These are detailed in child protection and safety plans. The contextual safeguarding team is in the process of being realigned, but it was too early for inspectors to see the benefits of this change. Excuse me a minute. I'm just going down. Performance management, introduction of highly effective performance management and audit systems supported by the reliable real time data is driving continuous improvement and compliance with expected practice standards. Robust daily and weekly management oversight meetings chaired by senior managers ensure that children being visited more frequently and are seen alone. Action by leaders following the ofsted focus visit in 2023 as ensure that children are promptly allocated to the right service. Excuse me. OK. Signs of safety service model. Lambas recently implemented the practice model as unified a myriad of approaches and brought clarity for staff managers and partner agencies. Workforce. Again, they commented on this. Leaders are fully aware of the challenges in recruiting qualified and experienced social workers. These channels have led to multiple changes in staff, which impedes the development of trusting relationships with children. Assiduous work by council leaders is having a positive impact in addressing these issues. A comprehensive and effective workforce recruitment and retention strategy includes successful initiative to recruit social workers internationally and to support newly qualified social workers to move into permanent post. Gradual and thoughtful allocation of children's cases commensurate with social workers experiences positive. Recently recruited international social workers are very positive about the sport they have had, including living accommodation, induction and training. Excuse me, I'm just going down. Areas for improvement. Frequent visits to children to better align with their assessed needs. Frequency of purposeful direct work with children to build relationships and understand lived experiences. Managers recorded analysis on the impact of social intervention case supervision and in audit records aligned to the children's plans. These action will be added to the improvement plan embedded in the road map to excellence with a comprehensive set of outputs to meet these outcomes. Thank you. Thank you. I don't know if there's any questions by anybody. That's great. At this point, unless any other officers, anything to add to that, I will go directly to members' questions. I mean, you've all read the report. Lots of good there and I think there's a few points of improvement. Have you any particular questions you wish to ask? Yeah, I've got two. I've got Tom Armstrong. Yeah, go with you. Yeah, I just wanted to ask in relation to point 2.6 in reference to the issues around recruitment and retention. Yeah. I think it's fantastic in terms of the work that's being done to onboard new incoming social workers as well as sort of bringing people abroad and providing housing and support for them. What I wanted to ask is what work is being done to sort of support retention within the social worker workforce and also what work is being done to ensure that as more experienced social workers are departing, that we're retaining key information and sort of a corporate memory for Lambeth Council. So that knowledge base is lost as we bring in new people in to sort of replace the workforce that's coming out. No, those are those are those are good questions. And I fully understand why you asked that, because it's important, isn't it? Because we need that memory. There's been there's been a lot of work in in terms of at the moment we're trying to continue to work. There's a lot of absorbing. Agency workers who have been in Lambeth for some for a considerable period of time, really, and and and work with them coming on board. So there's been a lot of work where there's been quite successful. I'll talk about corporate parenting where all the all the team managers now are permanent. They've all come on board. Again, we're starting to see that in all the other service areas. So it's an area that people are coming on board. We're bringing those people on people. Those practice who have been here for some time that kind of gives you some illustration that they like Lambeth. They like what Lambeth is about and they can see those changes. We've got the Social Work Academy who work quite tightly with not only the international social workers, but with the rest of our social workers, whether agency or permanent to do that work. And what you can see gradually is there's a lot of interest in people coming on board. So we hope by, you know, it's kind of getting that balance, isn't it? So it's weighing it up that, you know, as some people are going, we've got people who have been around for a while. People who will be staying here for much longer because they want to be part of that journey and the work that we undertake. And so with that and the Social Work Academy, there's an awful lot of work undertaken as well as managers all the way up. And even myself, who obviously sits on panels. I'm in the civic and I sit on the same floor as most practitioners and, you know, get to know people, get to know actually some of the cases they're working with. So there's a lot of there's a lot of work goes on there. And that means and that means a lot. And I think for social work, it is very much about relationships. And as you can imagine, post pandemic, there's been a lot of work really about how we how we start to see more practitioners coming into the office. And you can see that that's certainly something I've seen this year, you know, certain days you can see the floors absolutely packed with practitioners. And there's a nice when I said that there's a nice vibe. You can see people that there, you know, people are sort of talking to each another across the teams and there's a lot of work going on in that way. There's events as well that people do, you know, where we have sort of. We've just introduced just last year where we where we have what they're called is a breakfast, but that's more about all the services coming together and just a way of sort of building those relationships. So I don't know if that's answered some of your questions or all of them. Sorry. I don't answer the question. Thank you. You're okay with that. Any other questions? Council Bryant. Yeah, thank you. My question is looking at paragraph 2.2, so particularly support children with complex needs. Yeah. I'm just interested if you could just elaborate. I'm aware there's been a change in terms of this. Now there's a sort of more holistic service that covers the whole age up to age 25. You could expand a bit about the change in that. And then secondly, obviously the report states that this transformation has vastly improved services for disabled children. And I just wonder how is that evidenced? And how is it measured if you like? And how will we be able as a scrutiny committee to see that level of improvement is actually maintained in subsequent years? Yeah. So in terms of that transition though, there's there's been a lot of work in terms of with adults and children. Coming together, you know, it's very well thought out and and parts of that. I guess what Ofsted's recognizing is we're recognizing that for a lot of our children and then young people going through the different stages. What what you won't have that you would have had before with children when it was the former children with disabilities? What a lot of what a lot of the parents and carers spoke about was at different junctures, you know, you you'd get service up to this and then you would have to move on to another. And what this actually means is that it's seamless in the sense of it means that you you can you should be what they can see what we're working towards is actually you're planning out that care for that child. So it's not like you get to this age and then you've got to move over to this team in terms of transitions. It means they're all in the in one team, so it means you work across the board. It also means that you, you know, in terms of skill base, you develop that skill base of adults understanding some of the children's issues around safeguarding, as you know, will also go into adult safeguarding to a certain degree. And so what you know, the aim of that is that families shouldn't feel that they've got to constantly, you know, be changing one service to another. You know, it is it's it's it's about that learning and I think what Ofsted could see was there's an awful lot of work and then looking again when they can they look at files, you know, randomly they'll they'll choose file. We can put forward those, but they will look at those, but they can see there is there is such a difference really to where it was a year ago. And I'm not saying that it's fully embedded completely because it's like anything. We all we still review it. We still have a board that meets monthly where we go through and we look at areas that we need either tweaking or refining, you know, to ensure that we're not losing sight of that. We link into the parents forum, which is is which is very positive and and that really was an area that we needed to really engage better with. And I'm talking about going back to hold on. I'm looking at September 23 where we started really sort of doing that work and working with our, you know, the parents forum because that's important. You know, we need that feedback, but generally speaking, it will mean that our children and young people will receive a much better service. Again, we work closely with our send colleagues and education, so it's it's just a lot more joined up and that's important really because as you know, it's it's not just you know, that's not just in the community. It's children again that we are corporate parents for that we need to be looking out for it. It just raises the bar in terms of everybody's skill base, but ultimately it means that people will get and receive a much better service. Well, thinking back on that one of my questions is about how how is improvement measured? Oh, sorry. And that's that's measured by again. Sorry, that's by we undertake audits, which is part of, you know, the whole sort of quality assurance through audits, through random sort of looking at cases through again through that regular meeting where I said where we we not only we meet as a board. You know, that's adults and children as part of that not 25, but it's also relating information from partners because they're crucial to all of this. So we don't work in isolation. So that's why I was saying about we have a good relationship with our education send, but also you've got the parents forum, which is that. So there's lots of what we call our critical friends where where we meet with them. They'll feed fat information will go away if we can't answer it then. But actually it's that you said and this is what we've done to try and address that. So it's always about. A lot of it is the QA part where you're constantly looking and making sure that what's working well, what's not working so well and closing the gaps from a sort of systems point of view. You know, we so it's constantly looking at where can we improve? What do we need to do to make sure we're improving? But it's also listening to the voice of of children and young people where they're able to voice or say that, or if not, they can't voice it either their advocates or through their parents and carers. Thank you Bob. Thank you Bob. OK Councillor Brian. Got any more questions? Councillor Adam. I just want to ask about, you know, a big challenge working with families is a kind of cultural competency of social workers or practitioners in general. You see the data from the schools, the pupils, like 82% of numbers, the pupils, you know, people are from ethnic minorities. Yeah. So I mean, what are we addressing? Because it does pose a big challenge in the communication piece of social workers and families and children. Yeah. And it's not just a case of like providing an interpreter for like the big important meetings, but it's just making every, every contact or every community count. Yeah. So kind of empowering the parents as well to be able to be informed. I mean, I don't know how many of the people in the parents forum are from minorities who are able to, you know, to feed into the work, give feedback and support, but it's just what do we, what are we doing about? It's just upscaling our social workers so they're not spending time. There's an awful lot of work going on. I couldn't give you the statistics in terms of staff and how that works, but I could come back to you on that. But in regards to addressing that, that's always important. One of the great things about Lambeth that I love about Lambeth is the diversity and it's how we embrace that and how we go about that. And it's important and you're quite right. It's about those assessments. So there's lots of work through our EDI, which we, we work very tight, tightly with, with the officers in charge of that. And we do a lot of work through the Social Work Academy and constantly, you know, looking at that in terms of where, where we sit with that. The use of interpreters, you're quite right. It's that's one, that's one area, but it's also working with our community and with members of the community who can help really support us in understanding some of that. So it is about, that's, that's a crucial part of any work. As I would say, if you're doing any assessment and you've got to look, you know, the relevance of that is important and it's important not, not to sort of forget that when working with anybody really from somebody, you know, from a different background that we may not understand. But it is about how we manage that and it's the tools that are there to do some of that. So interpreters are one of it, but also there's community leaders, there's faith groups, there's all those sort of things that we link in with that I, that I believe we, we, we have a good working relationship with those faith groups. And we do keen to that because it is, you know, I always use that term who narrates the narrative and it's important when you, when you're working with somebody, if, if you don't understand that and it's not just taking a blanket approach that, you know, if you come from a particular community, this is what the expectation is. And as you know, the, the, the, the many serious case reviews that were done, certainly the Victoria Klimby was a classic where you add, you add people who made, who had misconceived ideas of someone from a particular group or community and they never checked that out. And that's the other side that we do a lot of is checking that out because, you know, things do evolve. Culture is when people use culture. I always smile because I think we've all got our own culture within our own household. So what do you mean by that? So it's all those sort of things that there's a lot of work taking place in the council about understanding equalities, understanding the whole issue around discrimination. And now that plays out sometimes and that power base that we have generally as, as social workers. It's important not to lose sight of that and ensure that we're equitable across the board and anybody that we work with, we treat them how I would like to be treated. I don't know if that answers your question. Thank you, Rob. If you have no other questions, then before I move to recommendation, I'd just like to ask Councilor Kind if he wants to add anything in there, because it's quite a comprehensive introduction. But I don't know if you wish to say a few words. Apologies for being late. I was across the road celebrating the 20th year of the St. Matthews project and the film has just come out. And if you've got time, go and see the photo exhibition at Lambeth Archives because it shows the heart of what community can mean. But I don't have anything to add because I missed the questions that you said and what Bob introduced on the item. You heard all the questions. It was just Bob's introduction. But obviously the thing to know is of good progress. And if anything, I just take the opportunity to thank Bob and Brenda's on the screen and Gerald and Aprilis here in the room and all of their teams for the work they've done, because a huge amount of the success hinges on the people in the team. And it's a very different result and a very different team to where we were when the offset has previously been to see us. So for me, it's a big thanks to the workforce. That's the most important part of what we did. That's a great lead into my suggested recommendation actually. But it's based on questions or whatever, but generally from having read it myself what's in there. I think the actual finesse it later, but my suggestion is that we welcome the report and congratulate all the staff involved. Look forward to seeing future improvements on the world we got as we're on that journey. Thank you. Anyone else with us to amend that or finesse it back to them myself? Otherwise we go with that. Agreed. Thanks so much. Just before we move on to the next item. Just to say that we've got a lot of items tonight, you might have noticed, and some of them are quite complex and meaty. So if I can just reminder that in order that the ones right at the end, because I've seen sometimes can get not enough attention. And I wouldn't want the ones at the end not to get the attention they deserve. So if we can brief as we can be, but not missing out anything that we really do wish to ask. Just to say that. So I don't think we can extend with past half past nine, but I could easily go until 11 tonight talking about statistics or something. Love to do. So we're okay with those there. Next we go on to something I think originally that I think that Councillor Banton I think raised in one book committee meeting last year. And the item on diversity in teaching workforce in Lambeth. As you see here, it's very much a detailed report on this subject. And I was so impressed and work gone into this and the amount of detail. It says here first year from Cabinet Member for Children and Families Council of Mankind, and then to introduce the item. Anything you wish to add to it? I don't know. I think that you're joining us. It's so brilliant. It's so brilliant. It's so brilliant. It's actually a game brain. She's the expert. Even if it says I'll pass you on to teams. One is, I'm sure that you agree, is just recognising the work that of Facer Denny and just quite how, he obviously left working for the county, retired last year after, I can't remember how long he'd worked for 20 years. But you can see in the report just quite how well a grip he had of what was going on. This is one example. He would do this across the board on everything. When you get to, if you've got time, you go to the back end of the report. You can see just quite how many of his previous reports referenced in there. And when you look at those, many of which the team can provide to you if you ever really want some heavy reading. They are, you know, other authorities I don't think are doing the work that he was doing to the level of detail that he was doing. So I think a huge credit to him and not to spend all our time thanking people. I think, you know, again, it's a big credit back. The other one that, before I hand over to Abrilly, is just wanting to point out that. Lambeth Council is not the employer of every teacher in Lambeth. The work that the council can do could only go so far. Even to the extent that for most community schools in Lambeth. Yeah, we're the employer because we protest their HR and schools HR deal with that. That's a team that sits under our structures. But ultimately, as some of you know, because some of you are educators yourself or involved in school governance, you know, the decisions are made in the town hall by the team here. So it's it's a partnership approach. That's the most significant bit is bringing all of those partners together to try to address challenges that are faced. But we need to recognise that the leavers the council have the direct leavers view and a lot of it is down to the, you know, where there has been successes down to the worker. Bringing in the team and being able to work in that partnership, that strong partnership we have to be out there working with the schools. Some of whom we've got. Educators in the teams who like Fraser have been in their schools for decades. You know, we've got head teachers who've risen up and so on through the chain and they're using their experience that they've gathered working in our community. That's a huge strength for young people in Lambeth. Really? Thank you, Councillor Klein. As you said, this report came out of scrutiny last year. So Professor Demme, as I always like to acknowledge his his academic stature, and he is he is a true academic. And as Councillor Klein said, has led on educational research in Lambeth for at least over two decades and was really instrumental when Lambeth was at its lowest in really getting strong data to drive school improvement. And, you know, we've seen that comes through from, you know, one year where I think 20 schools in Lambeth around 1990 went into special modules. Now, over 94% have been better. So there's been, you know, just just acknowledge and send that credit to the fees and his team and James who's on the call. They've all worked with him for a long time as well. But I think for us and, you know, almost as Councillor Klein was saying, we actually had to go to the DfE for this data. We had to raise a freedom of information request to get this information because we don't hold it centrally in the council. There's no conclusive evidence between, you know, the workforce and people outcomes. But I think it's important for us to begin to investigate and look for those patterns in academia and really conclude if there is a relationship. Because we know our young people often talk about lived experiences and role modelling and having examples, not just in teaching, but the leadership that they can aspire to be. So for us, you know, we as part of the education and learning strategy have set an ambitious target as one of our priorities that our leaders, both teaching leaders, support staff, but also governors, represent the workforce that they serve. We recognize that we also don't always represent our children and young people, but our governing bodies hold a lot of power as well and make key decisions, especially around exclusion, which we know is correlated with contextual safeguarding and criminal exploitation. Now, a lot of governing bodies sometimes don't recognize they have the power to overturn those decisions by her teachers as well and often may not have those lived experiences and understand those trajectories. So for us, we've set ourselves a target of at least 40% of our workforce at leadership level and governors from a black background, and that's to reflect the percentage of both black African and black Caribbean children, which proportionately makes up the biggest ethnic group amongst our ethnic minority groups. We know that our black African children do well or black Caribbean children do not do well. And there's a report obviously subsequently that supports that, but also in terms of representation of male and female staff, because we know our boys disproportionately doing those levels. That's nationally, that's internationally, but it's also true in Lambert. So having a workforce at leadership level again and in governance that reflects that gender makeup is also really key for us, for boys and schools to have key role models. So, you know, the data's in the report, Lambert's doing well in some of the proportionality data. Interestingly, black Caribbean leadership matches the proportion of black Caribbean children. So we do need to investigate, again, for some relationship or not there, but we know in most cases in Lambert, the vast majority of our children are from an ethnic minority background, and that does not reflect the workforce and definitely not at leadership level. And for us, we feel as a local authority, there needs to be a fair of real drive and we really need to look at policy both nationally and locally to incentivize, to encourage, to promote more staff and workers that look like children they serve. OK, so I've got down here a request to speak. Olivera O'Vanuri Thomas, co-chair of the Youth Council. Dan, if you want to come and sit, sit over here so we can hear you a little bit better. The microphones in here are not the best. If you can just, if you've seen the report or whatever, just anything you wish to add in roughly about three minutes, something like that. I think from what I've heard, the consensus with the Youth Council was pretty much reflecting what has already been said. I think there should be more of a push for teachers to more accurately reflect the kids that are in the school, so that when they do look up to leadership teachers, head teachers and whatnot, they can see themselves reflected in schools. And also across the board with other services, mental health services, sports services, everything in general. And we would like to maybe suggest that leadership training programs for ethnic minority teachers to help them into more senior roles, sort of empower them with the expertise and maybe even the paperwork for them to be able to prove to employers that they can fulfill those roles. And maybe induce some sort of cultural awareness sort of programs, maybe that's more institutionalized so that there aren't teachers or leadership people stepping into leadership roles unaware of certain cultural norms or yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I can a couple of notes. Right, so now we will turn to those questions. Who's got questions here? We've got Councillor Adam. I've seen, I've been working in Lubbock for these years as well, and I'm familiar with Faisa's work every couple of years. So that he would write this comprehensive. They're very gross. They're just standing, just read the whole thing. But every. Every one of his publications was the correlation between the higher minority teachers and the attainment of black students. Don't eat any more sweets when you're eating that. Good boy. Oh, sorry. Talk to Mike. Usually say you're on mute. You're not on mute. And coming on, Councillor Adam. I mean, it's a 6% increase in ethnic minority teachers. So I don't know. So did that come about organically? Or was that a policy? Because I know we cannot tell schools, our maintenance was, especially these days, more and more of them have become academies. And if it's the role of a local authority to set policies, then why was this? This hasn't been known for years, especially in Lubbock. So where was starting to try and address it from school level? I was governor and it's very difficult to have any leverage to encourage the school to work on this if there's not policy or guidance directly coming from the local authority. So it becomes up to the leadership's interest or thing to push forward for this. There's not been any active to be able to do this. So. I don't know. How are we going to address this like the policies? If it's not just if the local authority cannot tell schools to do them? How are we going to make it better than that? Many, many years ago, I used to be a county council in Lancashire. And in those days, county councils and education was a lot more powers and influence about what schools did. National governments over the years have taken away a lot of the influence. So you still have that. But a lot of the way you could force schools to do things, they have a lot more choices now. But I'll pass it on to the response from. I mean, I think we have to do more. No, firstly, it starts with awareness. And I think sometimes is and I'm not going to use it on unconscious bias. I'm going to just use it on consciousness and not actually sometimes recognizing really explicitly. So, you know, I'm a sociologist by background, so I'm obsessed with data. And I always say we have to start with the data and make it really prevalent. And that's why for me getting the data in the first place was so important. And, you know, contacting the DFE to have the outcomes, sorry, the data on the proportions was key. Then it's about what we do with it. So we have actually in the past done training with governors and we've specifically focused on diversity in the workforce as a theme. We've had quite a few training that we've delivered through the governor's service in education where we've addressed issues like exclusion. We don't recognize the disproportionate exclusion and black boys particularly and really, you know, sharing with governors, as I said, their power to make decisions around children's outcomes at that level. Governors also make decisions around policy, including curriculum, including recruitment in terms of schools, HR or schools, HR team supports a high percentage of our schools in Lambert. So it's looking at our recruitment panels and really ensuring that those panels are diverse and they represent, again, the children that they serve so that when decisions are made about recruitment, we recognize that. And there's even more work that we need to do there as well. And there's a conversation I'm currently having with schools, HR and again, training governors to ensure that their panels are representatives. But I think it has started with data. And the reason we've set ourselves that target in the education strategy is so that we can now begin to where we can influence policy at school level. And I think it's through HR practices and it's through training for governors. I think that's the two key areas we can influence. We can make the final decisions, but I think we can raise the profile of it and share policies that we think is best practice. Thanks so much. Do you want to come back on that? I think the governors generally are relatively representative now because Lambert also supports schools to diversify their governors and I've been there. But it's still, it's not a very powerful position to be like, you're a critical friend or advisor, but you see things happen. And what you hear amongst other governors is the frustration that just things just don't change and an awful lot of power is retained within senior leadership. So it becomes up to them whether they want to change the culture of the recruitment or not. So if like, this is a much wider study, it's called the national data, but the numbers, the case has been this expert for many years. So I just think what are we able to do differently that we can do before to address this when we are actually children are just failing. And it's brilliant that we have got zero exclusions and now our exclusion rate is good, but not being excluded, thriving in education. You know, you've just been held there and then carried on and then you're still failing, you know, and then you come to youth club. So it's those things are not really a measure of the success of the child succeeding. These children are failing and obviously poverty and austerity has adds a lot to it, but the recommendation is policies to change, like what kind of policies can we need to change? Yep. That's for Armstrong. Yeah, so just coming back to the representation at the leadership level, completely agree with what you've talked about in terms of the governor's drive and recognise what Councillor Kine has said in terms of our ability to sort of intervene at the academy level. What work is being done, thinking about what was mentioned by the Youth Council earlier, around sort of training and mentorship as a sort of coordinating process within Lambeth Council. So having opportunities where existing ethnic minority leaders can mentor somebody who's earlier in their career and give them the support required. While yes, we can't directly go into schools and implement their policies, we can act to that sort of forum and coordination. So is work happening within that space or is there looking to be work done within that space at all? Yeah. So short answer, work is happening and more has to happen. So one of the data fees I have been monitoring is the recruitment of head teachers and the ethnic minority makeup. I can tell you, and it's not coincidental, it is intentional and deliberate that specifically that can't accommodate necessarily all ethnic minority groups in Lambeth. But definitely amongst Black Caribbean and Black African groups, we've actually seen a significant rise in head teacher appointments in Lambeth from Black minority groups. And what we do is we've introduced a head teacher induction program. We introduced that about two years ago. And that's where it's very, you walk into the room and it's quite evident that our new head teachers are predominantly from a Black background and representing children that they serve. But we also have more women coming into headship as well at all levels, primary and secondary school, which for us is very important in terms of the leadership. But we also match them with a mentor. So there's a strong mentoring program now for new heads coming into Lambeth with experienced heads and ensuring that, you know, they're familiar with the culture of Lambeth. But just so that they settle in their careers as well, so that they're sustained in their careers. And as I said, there's a lot of work going into government governance training. But I also have to say we need to do more and we need to really embed it in our HR policies, which the vast majority of our schools buy into anyway. And our practices, you know, we are addressing culture in other ways in Lambeth in terms of really intervention and support and the zero exclusion targets that we've set ourselves. But I'm just going to pick up on one point. Governors are more than advisors. Governors run schools. They actually have the power to run schools and make decisions for schools. They sign off every policy. They write every policy and they pull head teachers that count. And that's a core part of their job. It has to start with governance and it has to start with leadership at that level. And I think that's why for me empowering governance to know their power is even more important because sometimes governors don't recognise the power that they have in influencing change. And that's in academies as well. So there's much more work that we need to do there. So we've been intentional in looking at training at governance level because that's where it starts. They set the culture for schools. That's their statutory duty. Thank you. Thank you. And back on that. Yeah. So fantastic in terms of the link with mentors for new head teachers coming in. Can I just ask what work's been done in terms of like a leadership pipeline? So where they're sort of new, earlier in their career, teachers who maybe have leadership, who have leadership potential, who can sort of be mentored and taken through that process in that career. Is there a similar sort of mentorship program being looked at by Lambeth in terms of connecting an existing ethnic minority background leadership role person to somebody earlier in their career so that they can get that experience, that understanding of how to sort of move forward to get into leadership roles so we can continue to expand the number of people. Not enough. And that's one of the areas that we need to address. There's a lot of grassroots work going on. So one of our heads, I'm not going to call names, actually, as part of her work, actually, she runs a charity that is specifically targeted to raising black leaders. And she's one of our primary heads, but that's off her own back. And I think what we need to do more is tie into some of those grassroots programs as well, instead of reinventing real and develop it further. So, you know, unfortunately, not enough. But as I said, because we've been doing so much work with governance, we're seeing that coming through now in the recruitment of heads as well. So there's evidence of the impact, but we just need to, I think, build the policies around it so that it's really explicit. I'll just bring Councillor Kind in there before coming to Councillor Bryant. I'm just going to add and we can try and look at getting you some of the figures for it as well. Not to say that we don't have the role, but also when you're thinking about Pipeline, not to forget that we have a reasonable number of schools that are in federations, either formal or at least loose partnerships. And we also have a large number of academies, so we see them working in partnership and working in, you know, we have the cluster system here as well. So there's a there's a lot of dimensions to the implementation of it. It's not all primary schools or secondaries, you know, all sixth forms is not a simply pyramid sort of structure going up to further and higher education. Which again, just to reinforce the point, it makes it harder for the interventions. You know, I think if we were looking back to the 1980s and working with Ilya and at a different time, there'd be that direct role of the Council working with the Education Authority, going in and doing the actual stuff in the schools. But as Brynny has pointed out, and is the point ultimately, it comes back to what you're saying about what we've done. So much of it relies on us setting direction and and trying to encourage it to take place. But we do need that partnership to keep working. Yeah, I've got Councillor Bryant and I'll be looking to some things after that. Yeah, I'm looking at the issue around the totality of the teacher population. And it seems to be it's almost like a national problem that obviously there's this disproportionality between the proportion of teachers who are from B&E backgrounds versus proportion of pupils. And that must be something around obviously the selection of people of people into teacher training program. Or is it something around the attractiveness of teaching as a career to people from B&E backgrounds? It's not something that says we can control here, but I'm wondering if you've got any observations about why it would appear that people from B&E backgrounds see teaching as less attractive than other people. And is there's anything possibly locally that we can be doing about in terms of actually promoting teaching as a career? I mean, well, Lambert and quite a few schools in Lambert a few years ago. We have at least one head teacher in the room actively recruited teachers from abroad, you know, so they went out into the Commonwealth. They went into Jamaica, St Martins in the field. I think half of their staff was from Jamaica when there was a real shortage of just teachers period nationally. When I came to the UK 22 years ago, teaching was considered a shortage occupation at the time. So, you know, when I decided to train to teach that, there was a real advantage to me as a first generation migrant. And actually for me, you know, I'll say this quite public because I'm quite proud of it. I started my career in Wilshire and Wilshire gave an extra point to me for being a woman and black. And I thought, thank you, Wilshire, you know, because that really got me on the ladder. As I said, as a new migrant to the country, I had my qualifications, but actually having that little, as us Americans would call it affirmative action, really made a difference to me getting my foot in the door. And there was an extra point for male primary school teachers as well. So I think sometimes you have to be that intentional and maybe it's about how we work with universities, any skits, any training centres to say, how can you incentivise? I actually got into the graduate teacher programme, so I was paid to teach rather than having to pay to learn to teach. And so maybe we have to go back to some of our providers and see if there's ways to incentivise, you know, people from different backgrounds to join teaching. And we can control that in Lambert, but it's a national conversation we definitely need to try to influence. So there was got a quick question there on the actual recommendations. Trainers on about what can we do differently? We're not doing already. I mean, there's a thing in there about sort of leadership training programmes. The black leaders. And maybe that includes sort of mentorship as well, but there already is mentorship going on, but reviewing. How that's done. I think there's a particular point in there as well. I speak as an ex school governor myself from a long time ago. The point about lack of male primary school teachers with some of the, actually that's been going on since forever. It's actually training or awareness for school governors that there is this gap. Powers they have to address it. Is there anything else that, I mean, I'll try and get that into a sort of written up way. But is there anything else in sort of recommendations? Anyone else wishes to add in there within the actual powers that we have? We've been as a council in current legislation. Sure, Catherine. Following on from the example you gave of the primary school head teacher who's doing sort of work on her own back. The recommendation might be to look at ways in which Lambert can engage with teachers in that sort of space. To support them in the work that they're doing to promote mentorship and support and avenues to bring. Recognizing the challenges of. Fragmented academization system and. So ways to engage with generally with head teachers. Generally with head teachers, but identifying where there's some grassroots local programs being done. Where we as Lambert council can help to promote and work with them to do that and maybe replicate at a wide level. To drive that forward. I don't know if that's. Observation. Maybe it's just struck. We talked about the limitation of powers and academies and that control. And looking at the numbers. You know. Academies compared to locally in the main schools in terms of the workforce. And they're basically the same. In primary and. Academies are six points ahead in terms of ethnic minority representation. In the whole. I don't know the leadership's in here. I couldn't find it. But. So I just. We write this up. There's something about being slightly careful about how we talk about that. Because some. Don't know what's underlying this. But the academy chains that are outpacing the local authority in terms of that. And I always have to say that our academies are part of all Lambert schools partnership. So we work together. And he had to be very cool to actually be head teacher of an academy as well. So, you know, we, we, we don't work separately with academies anyway. And actually, you know, through the LSP, we're able to bring those, those pieces of work together. I think it comes to that kind of thing. It's more the influence. It's more the influence at governance because a lot of work have academies might be run by. Both bigger trust, you know, sit way out of Lambert. So we just have to be mindful of that. I just said, as again, you said. Actually introducing leadership training programs and reviewing our mentorship programs. Leaders. Training awareness for school governance of their powers and what the issue is that needs addressing. And ways of looking at ways of engaging with head teachers, identifying grassroots schemes. Where appropriate, rolling them out across. Fair enough. I think our HR policies or recruitment policies as well. So having those model HR policies around. That review of HR policies. I think, yeah, probably making sure that all HR policies that we share with schools look at panel makeup and recruitment. That focus looks at equality impact as part of the work that they do because, yeah. And probably introducing equality impact assessments in recruitment so that governors kind of check themselves before they engage in recruitment. I think that would be a really powerful thing to do. Civil service does it, but I'm not sure we always do it in local. We always do it in local. Sure. I'm strong. Best practice from our schools as well. We've had a session as governors. Not as governors, we had a group of parents like an inclusive kind of diversify the curriculum and all of that. And so we met with this head teacher who was from somewhere in Essex. But how they might improve the whole improvement package, like the imagery on the advertisement said what they were looking for. The wording on the advertisement said what they were looking for. So they were, they got what they were looking for. So it's because there's always the excuse that, oh, you know, black teachers don't come forward or people who are ethnic minority don't come forward. If you're not invited to come forward, then they're not coming forward. So that whole, it has to actively say that we're looking for a diverse workforce. If the one that's trying to go to that school was, you know, sort of beyond just your locality, like linked with universities or supporting schools to make with universities. A lot of minority teachers are graduating from teacher training, but they're just not getting the jobs in schools. They're graduating is how we make that. The schools learning from others will have success. Practice where we can find it. That sounds okay for everyone there. Great. Thanks so much for that. That was a really interesting report from me. And I was so impressed with that. It really is academic standard data. I mean, generally scrutiny, we always ask for data and metrics and things and really got that detail there. And then later on, I think we'll see that repeated in another report. And it's just so, so much missing. He has a good team left, don't worry. Yeah. Oh yeah. Obviously a good team there as well. Obviously well trained by him. But. So next. We have. Two papers out. On pages 71 to 97, pupil place planning. We'll first hear from the Cabinet Member for Children and Families Councillor Ben Kind and then it offers us to introduce the item. That's been kind. Thank you chair. I won't go through the report because you've read it, but also because for the elected members of the committee, we've discussed it at length. And I've attempted to try to make sure that ward councillors especially are kept up to date with proposals and changes that are affecting them. What I will repeat is this is not a situation that either I nor anybody that works in the education team or really anybody in the schools or the community want to be in. It's some of the most difficult challenges that we have to make. We have. However, got a statutory obligation on us to manage the provision of school places in Lambeth and the decision falls towards the local authority to put those proposals into place. We're taking the best advice that we get from our team and everybody in the schools are affected by this. And what I would say as well is throughout the entire process. It is sort of natural to note that for every school that is affected, they would not want their school to be one of the schools that is is impacted by the proposal to ruin here. And for them, this is some really significant changes to their community and for others that are sitting there concerned. What if? And I think that the most important thing for us to remember as the local authority is that our responsibility is for across the whole of the borough. The plan that was first introduced to me in 2022, but that as a brilliant would recognize as well, has been being worked on for years. We've been about managing pupil places across the whole borough to ensure that the system is there supporting young people no matter where they live. And so it's not about, you know, sort of discussions about which one this and which one that is using data. It's being driven by the trends that are there. The real numbers of the the actual school census data and the and the predictions using some of the work done by our fantastic team to be able to look at forecasts and see spot where things are changing over time. The proposals have obviously been through cabinet. I would also highlight they had, I think, perhaps some of the longest period of consultation that schools in London have had three months of informal consultation and another month of formal consultation. And even then we didn't really stop the informal consultation for the three weeks, four weeks in between. We carried on and anybody that sent in comments during that period still have their contributions in that informal stage put in. But it goes well beyond that because a brilliant team had been doing that engagement well before the informal consultation started and we had been discussing it internally before we brought those proposals further. And. I mentioned that because it's in stark contrast to what we have seen in other situations where we have seen sudden announcements, sudden closures. And I remember as you will as well, pretty when the unions sat down with us and said the worst thing that can happen for people whose jobs are affected and for communities. communities is for sudden announcement that sees four weeks later a decision that means people don't know what's happening to their kids education, the young people affected are being split up and move their friendship groups broken up. And for people whose jobs are involved that they lose their jobs or find that they've got to face the pressure of looking elsewhere. And so we've at all times attempted to mitigate that pressure. But of course. Throughout the process, there are some people who said you've gone too slow. There are some who said you should go a lot slower, but that obligation doesn't stop on us. And we can't sit there and do nothing because the reality is that schools. Some of the schools are finding themselves in an increasingly more difficult position in terms of how they can manage to keep afloat given the low levels of people numbers that they've got. That's the bottom line of this. People numbers are declining and we have the obligation on us as a statutory responsibility to manage that situation. So we have to be able to do this kind of work. Do you have something on anything really? No, that's a weird question. We'll go straight to any questions then. And we've got Mr Garud and then we've got Councillor Le Brine afterwards. I'm firmly in there. You've gone too slowly, Cam. As everybody knows. With these closures, where are we in terms of those that are over-capacity? Now, how big is the, I mean, going through this pain, there's more pain to come. How big is that over-capacity in near-preception places that will come out in some way? And I suppose what's your feeling that we can do any, how much of that can we do through Cam Reductions without some questions and how much isn't it? It's now down to third resort amalgamations. I mean, I feel, I've felt every inch of that pain just to stress. It's been incredible. Yeah, I mean, when I met with governors after the Covenant meeting, I shared, and maybe I should have attached it here, a picture of what next, you know, based on the decisions that were made in November. So maybe I can share that with scrutiny because it went into great detail and there's no picture of it getting better. Anywhere. And by anywhere, I mean by planning area. We've managed this very much planning area by planning area because we've tried to respond to demand in different communities as opposed to just because, you know, Lamba's a very long borough. So we have to recognise there's differences. And the south is very different from the north and the middle of the borough. But on no forecast and just to, and I will share that PowerPoint, what we're seeing is we have an excellent people place planner that works with us. And her predictions are almost spot on. And we are seeing now what we're seeing is going to come through the door. In the east planning area is an example where we have the greatest fall. Her predictions was a couple of pupils out from years ago. So we're getting much more sophisticated in terms of seeing what we're going to see in terms of applications for places and take up and what's resulting in that census data in October and January, which is sort of the two key points we capture the data. So we know the data is accurate and the data is saying every single planning area and the entire borough is going to continue to be inefficient. And unfortunately, that's going to come through in a few years to our secondary schools, but luckily our secondaries made a lot of changes over time and are much more efficient currently. So, you know, I can't say this is the end. How we manage it going forward is what matters. I have to always say there are four drivers and one, the biggest driver is excellent education. That's always been the biggest driver because we have to maintain high quality. High quality. We're proud of what our schools are doing in class, but in spite of the challenges that they're having, we want to maintain choice for parents. And that includes choice in locality, but also if they wanted to go to a faith school or not go to a faith school. And we also need to maintain education assets because we don't want to be in a predicament in 20 years time where we're building schools because we remove schools. So those drivers will continue at the heart of what we do, but we have to do it collaboratively with schools. It's not easy. I'm sat in those rooms and I can tell you that I feel the weight of every single conversation. But ultimately, excellent education is at the core of this. And if schools don't have children, they don't have money and they can't deliver good education over time. So doing this with schools now will help protect the quality of education and choice for parents as well. So it might be pan reductions. It may be amalgamations and closures, but we have to have those conversations with schools. How can you want to add something there before? Yeah. Just that back in 2022, when we first sat in this room and discussed it, the original report was quite clear that our plan was that there was a way forward via pan reductions that could have delivered the majority of the numbers that could have delivered the majority of the numbers that at that time we were looking for. And that did not realize the projections that we put. And again, that just go back to the bit that that wasn't like, you know, a single moment in time. The team had been doing huge amounts of engagement before that. In fact, a lot of schools have voluntarily come forward. Not just community maintained schools, faith schools, academies, they had made reductions and they had attempted to do it. But again, it goes back to the bit that there is a fragmented system and we are not the sole decision maker for all of school admissions in Lambeth in the sense of the process. And we do have to work in partnership with those who can set their own levels. Now, schools in Lambeth have pretty much every year, I think, come to us about schools outside of Lambeth continuingly just increasing their their pan. And saying to us, look, that puts pressure on our schools if they just continue to expand and people are applying for those schools, they're not going to schools in the borough. So this isn't just a Lambeth issue. This is a cross border issue to issue across London's increasingly actually in parts of the country outside of London is occurring as well. And I think that we've got to recognise actually how 15 years worth or more of shift in the way that the education system worked didn't really prepare us for this moment. Now, the legislation that's going through does begin to change that, but quite how soon that will come. All of that's then got to be balanced against if you could do it by just plan reduction on its own. How do you begin to have the conversation with the community that schools that are oversubscribed, where parents are choosing to put down number one, even though we've got some of them, you know, they may have two or three forms, but they're getting twice as many applications at first preference. How do you sit there and turn around to that school and say, no, we're going to reduce your plan at the same way that we've got to have the conversation with those schools that don't have that coming in? So doing it on a plan alone is a very difficult challenge because of the balance that's got to be strong. Gregor, do you want to come back? Just to be done, there was no agenda about trying to do a panel, you can't and you shouldn't be trying to and all those things. I think, and I understand this is really difficult. I think just to understand where we are, I can't quite see the papers, where we are, how much, how big is the, how big is the over capacity of care reception or care reception that we're looking at? I need it. Either because the pan is reduced or because we're a bit longer and the production is a bit further. Because I think that would just really help us know the scale of the challenge that you're facing. Now I know it's going to get worse, it's the same for the demographics, but the, just where are we now? Because I don't, I don't think we're, where you want to, where you want to be for all the reasons you said in terms of closing that out capacity. The paper is a paper of updating on the process that went to cabinet last year and that's why it doesn't go beyond that. So if the committee decides you want to have that, you can ask for those papers to come forward. I think the important bit at the moment is we've just gone through the period of applications coming in. The numbers are being crunched at the moment. I believe you've already recognized we still have work to do that is there, but we need to base that in up to date figures. We, we can't sit there and say it should be this in that area now for two years away because we need to be able to do what I'm really saying that Karen does in being able to predict using the data, but also base decisions in the current context. And that's what we've done so far, but those numbers will be produced and they will become publicly available in the next few months as things like the January census is completed and we know the final roles that we've got from that. We'll know the full applications and international offer day exactly how that sits without the borough applications. So the whole thing will come together in the next couple of months to be able to give the new context because you don't. I don't don't think any of the schools wants to be driving it using data from last year, the year before today. I mean, I would generally expect where we get to important points on this that the appropriate things would come to scrutiny. I've got to admit, I have a bit of a personal interest as well as I have a son will be turning free soon and probably like a lot of families will be wondering what choices we'll have for him within the borough and elsewhere in the forthcoming years. It's these things you can't always predict exactly how things are going to go because you don't have next year's data yet. But has anyone got any more questions on this? Yeah. Oh, yeah, Councillor Bryan. Yeah, sorry. I'm a stupid cock. Sorry. The first one just asked for relief is an update on this with only Trinity and Penstanting. Well, obviously, the cabinet decision was to close both those schools, but it was also a recognition that they had, they were somewhat later in the day, considering a matter of joining together with a single school. I think it was left up to the two schools to come up with a viable proposal. I'm sure I've sent an email about it in the last two weeks. I was looking for it today and I just couldn't find it. I was not thinking I was dreaming. No. I do start having dreams about school amalgamation. But anyway, can you just give us an update? Yeah, no problem. So the schools launched their formal consultation, or as they call it, representation stage of the statutory process for closing or amalgamating schools on the 21st of January. And that consultation and the statutory notice was shared as well will close on the 28th of February, and they're currently proposing to amalgamate Holy Trinity and Penstanton to Penstanton's site. So it's open to consultation, you know, members of the public, and that includes anybody here can make representation during that time. And then when it's closed, they will then ask them to schools, you know, assess the outcomes of that consultation. There are two public meetings next week. So there's one on the 12th. I was getting wrong, wrong. I'll check in a second. Monday 13th at both schools. So again, conference is a public meeting anyone can attend. And then the expectation is they will then bring a final proposal to cabinet, essentially, and they will. Well, based on your outcomes proposed, we support whatever that proposal is. So yes, it will come to cabinet. That's not been published on the forward plan just yet. But there's been a request for it too. Councillor Brown, are you going to come back? I mean, the second part of my question was easy to ask, because the second part of my question was also then about more generally looking at, obviously, where we've got this process of amalgamation. How the consequences are being tracked. And I suppose that it's probably useful for a report to come back to us. Because obviously, the one particularly I'm concerned that obviously came up at the discussion in November is around John the Divine, which is emerging with Christchurch in Brickstone, I think. And obviously, it comes a bit to Council of Kind's point of view about schools in other boroughs trying to poach pupils. Obviously, St John the Divine, because it's right on the border, there was obviously a lot of opposition from the parent group there. And I suppose it's a worry that what will happen is that a lot of the parents may take their children to schools in Southwark. And therefore, it kind of undermines the rationale. Because obviously, the whole idea of the amalgamation for it, we all understand, is about creating financially sustainable schools. And the idea is that obviously is to create one financially sustainable school from those two schools. But actually, if enough people transfer from St John the Divine to the Christchurch, to Christchurch, then that's undermined and we still have a problem. I think I'll just go back to the point that were made that the forecast is that there is enough demand there in the years to come for a school, a single form entry school in that area. And of course, it meets the need for us to maintain some other requirements as well, including faith school, boogie ride distance, all of the other aspects that are there. What there is not is demand to keep two schools. So there's not enough pupils to keep two schools operating in the area now. Parents may make decisions about their pupils currently at the school. There's a brilliant team have absolutely been steadfast in pointing out the basis is is on including the future prediction of demand in the area. So it is not the model doesn't work just if. It's the existing pupils because they will have passed through the school in a few years. It needs to be based on is there going to be a sustainable population there after those pupils have gone? Because obviously if you're in year six at the moment, you've left at the end of this year. You are largely on your as an individual and affected by the outcome. If you're in reception year, it's completely the opposite. You've only just started your journey so. You can't view it just through the prism of a visit just about the decision of parents. You've also got to take into account the fact that actually the reason that the two schools were part of the proposal is because they had already a small number of parents choosing those schools, small number of pupils going to those schools. And I don't doubt the importance of the schools to their communities. But but, you know, you look at the other end of the scale and you can see schools that are, like I said earlier, getting twice the number of applications for the number of spaces they have. And that's that's not sustainable when you look at it as a whole broader approach rather than an individual school by individual school. Decisions are made. That's the whole. That regards. Okay, you don't. Got another Counselor up to it. Just before you come in Counselor Armstrong, remember the youth council said the wish to actually contribute? I'm Alex. I'm the coordinator of the Youth Council. Firstly, I wanted to say I appreciate being invited into these spaces to share with you guys. I think it's very important for youth to be in these conversations. when it inevitably affects young people. Our co-chair, Oliveira, has one question. However, we do need to leave afterwards, if that's all right. Thank you. That's absolutely fine. I wanted to ask if there is data collected as to why, what are the driving reasons as to why there's a decline in the uptake of pupils in schools? Is it the schools themselves or is it the environment for young people, the infrastructure that surrounds the schools? Like after-school clubs, youth clubs, stuff like that. Really, or Ben, would you? The biggest driver is the reduction in birth. People are having less children, essentially. And we've seen a 30% decline in the birth rate across Lambert's pretty much since 2009. And we've also seen that reflected in our schools, which was at its peak in 2006 as well. And it will decline further. There's just less people having less children, I think. Because actually, it's not reflected in our schools. And the vast majority of our schools are not standing and doing quite well academically as well. And we've always been clear in saying this is not penalising schools that may not be performing. It's just looking at what the data is seeing. And especially in some areas of the borough, we are seeing further up, bigger declines. And that could have other factors attached to it. But there's not necessarily a relationship between school performance and numbers. It is predominantly birth rate and migration. So, I think, in our neck of the woods, there's two of the schools that are in the proposal. So, in South Brixton. And there's also, then there are other schools that are there that are thriving and doing really well. And part of the problem is when you take what Brilly was saying, if you have then a lot of primary schools. When you get parents who could choose in South Brixton to send their bids to one of ten primary schools. Whereas, when I went to school, it was you go to the nearest one, but you don't really get a choice. It's the catchment area was so tight, that was it. So, part of the problem then becomes our choice. I don't mean there's problems in a negative thing, but it's a factor we have to start taking into account. Because parental choice now means, as we know, you can live in the south of the borough and you can send your kids to the school in the north of the borough. If you want, you're probably going to get in to schools at the moment because lots of schools have spare places. So, lots of schools are like trying to get as many people to get into them as possible. And that then becomes a thing if you're dropping your kid to work and you're going a certain way. You're a woman, dad, little partner or, you know, grandma's doing the after school stuff. You pick your schools based on some of those things. It's not just the school at the end of the road, next to the estate. People are able to make decisions. In fact, that's what partly then drives out of borough applications. And so we see people across schools in the south of the borough, Dominic and York Ward, Woodmanstone, one of the most oversubscribed schools in the country. People from other boroughs wanting to send their kids to that school, places great demand on it. And it goes to the bit that you were saying really about why schools in south of borough have a very different picture. Because they do have a lot of that at borough. So it becomes a big massive sort of like a mess of different factors that we've got to take into account the balance at all. So we can actually go on to Councillor Armstrong. After that, unless there's any burning questions, I'd like to move on to the last but extremely important item actually. Councillor Armstrong. Yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, start when you look at the sort of speed as you go from a pound surplus to a pound deficit under the current projections. So absolutely think it's right that I'm taking this forward. I also think it's right to sort of do the informal and formal consultations in order to ensure that we get this right in the way that we do it and holding onto the assets. I think it's really important as well for that long term planning. My question is in relation to point 1.8 of the reports, which is around sort of the workforce itself and a comment by Andrew Carter, the corporate director, that it's not possible to commit to no compulsory redundancies. I can understand why that's a reason as well as welcome to the idea of the recruitment freeze as an attempt to sort of mitigate that happening. What I wanted to ask is what other support is going to be provided to the workforce during this process in terms of will there be job matching activities? Will there be efforts to link up with other boroughs potentially in terms of if they've got vacancies within roles to support workers sort of moving from redundancy roles into other employment? Will there be support coming out of the sort of Lambeth work stream if there's any work we've done around there? Yeah. So thank you for that question, because one of the areas, this is an area I, you know, feel quite passionately about as well, because as I said, our schools do well because our staff do well and they do a fantastic job for children and young people. So we've been working on something we're calling a local offer and it's it's a non statutory agreement because, as I said, you know, we have been a very complicated education system and we often in most cases can't manage what happens at school level. But what we shared with schools early on was we would like schools to sign up to an agreement to hold jobs for once of a better term or to give staff who may be made redundant as part of any of these school first dibs for once of a better term. So we've consulted with the unions already and they've given us feedback on that. And we're just about to share the schools. We've actually consulted with the Lambeth Schools Partnership Board who are fully in support of that. And the vast majority of our schools sign up to the partnership. And we're also designing an IT system on a system we already use to promote teaching jobs, but one that will make it really simple for staff who potentially at risk of becoming being made redundant can actually have their profiles lifted and schools can go there first if they have any recruitment. A really simple system that would be supported by schools, HR in the education team, and they would have first interviews on jobs and so on. And that's and for schools, that's really good because it's quite expensive to advertise for jobs on advertising websites. I shouldn't call names. So for schools that would save them a lot of money as well. So we're working with the IT team, design team, we're working with unions and the LSP to launch this local offer and that should go to school soon. And we're hoping that schools would opt out rather than opt in to get a full engagement. But we're also looking to deliver training and support for staff as well on interview skills. Some staff have worked in the same school for 20 plus years, haven't done an interview for a long time. So really looking at their interview skills and CV writings, the application forms, you know, all that they need to prepare them to look for opportunities. And I feel really positive about it because what I love about Lambert is that collegiality work really well as a local authority. And I think quite a few of our members of staff will have opportunities to go for jobs in other schools through that local offer, local, not local offer, local agreement. Arrangement. So so we will share that with counsellors as well when it goes out to schools and comes back and it goes live. But some of our staff have said they would be prepared to take, you know, voluntary redundancy because they feel that at that time in their career as well. And we would support that process. So I think it's about ensuring that we respond to staff in a way that suits their needs. But but as we said in the report, it's difficult. So it's also potentially not legal for us to say, you know, there could be no compulsory redundancy. It's not possible. Thank you. Thanks so much. On the actual recommendation to sort of note the report, but also say that it. This is ongoing and it should come back in an appropriate time, but we will handle that as far to the program planning, which will be having another meeting for after the fourth coming AGM. Is there anything else there that anybody wishes to add as a recommendation apart from knowing the report? Yeah. Yeah. Is there anything else to add? Is there anything else to add? Yeah. Is there anything else to add? Yeah. Is there anything else to add? Yeah. Yeah. If you could actually share that PowerPoint. Yeah. It has to be. It has to be. You can actually send it out to counsellors. Okay. Has everyone agreed with that? In that case, we move on to what some would say was one of the most important items on tonight. Definitely. Lots of statistics again as well. And it's the Lambert Schools Achievement Report. It's on pages 99 to 192. As usual, we'll first hear from the Cabinet Member for Children and Families, Councillor Ben Kind, and then Officer to introduce the item. There's a lot in here. A lot of information. It comes with a broad suede of attainment stats. I think the things I would draw attention to are the trends over time and how that Covid impact is quite visible. Some of the tables are numbers, but some of them when you see it in graph form, the figure one, the very first one of my phonics, you can see the change, but you can see the trend that's happening of things beginning to rebalance as a result of that period. I think we can underestimate the impact that had had. I think we all kind of know that it was there, but I really do think that this kind of deep dive and the kind of information that you've got in the report tonight really does begin to cement quite how things work. Because you can also then look at it and you can then begin to see the key stage two figures and how different age groups GCSE figures, how it is different for different age groups as well. The extent of the impact. And then finally, just to say again, we go back to some of the conversations we've had before to not forget. The role of local authorities in education has changed. We do not run schools ourselves directly. A lot of this is done by the hard work of the education team, but also that very strong partnership together with schools, because it's only by doing that. You can drive systemic change across the board. There's some fantastic individual work that can be done with an individual school and an individual people. But to change it for the whole borough, it does need all schools to be working together and coming together through that partnership. But I'm pleased as a breeders reference already tonight. We have such a strong part of this company member because it is really important that people share their expertise, their knowledge, but also the same objectives and work together. To go first and then I'll bring in Karen Gemmline, who's been very patiently waiting for her. She's the head teacher of Lillian Baylis Technology School. But if you've got anything to add first. Karen would probably speak quite well. Well, if you're going to do that now then, if you'd like, yeah. Thanks very much for coming tonight. And for those of you who I haven't met before, my name's Karen Chamberlain. I'm the head teacher of Lillian Baylis Technology School, best school in Lambeth. If not the world. So Lillian Baylis Technology School is a Lambeth community school. We're in Vauxhall and we serve predominantly the very local community of the school. For a bit of context, we have a far higher than national average number of students who have EHCP. So it's approximately 7% of the school population. Pupil premium free school meals about 60% of the school population. And the majority of our pupils are from global majority ethnic groups. Predominantly black African, black Caribbean, white other groups. And obviously looking at the reports, you'll see there are certain trends that are not Lambeth trends. These are national trends of underachievement. And there are some key groups in Lambeth that are, you know, arguably very important in underachievement. And one of those is our black Caribbean students. And I think as a school, we've taken a very deliberate decision to look at our provision and make sure that it fully meets the needs of students and addresses all those barriers, including systemic ones to close the gaps that exist that really disadvantage the students. And I would categorise these as barriers from socioeconomic status, barriers from neurodiversity and special needs barriers associated with systemic racism. And particularly those groups that are black Caribbean would suffer from this. And by the way, I'm not saying Lillian Bayliss has ticked all the boxes and does all of these things brilliantly. But I think that our work has had some positive impact. Last year, black Caribbean students had an attainment rate of 45.2. So an average grade of about a four and a half, which is very close to national average for all students, but well above the Lambeth average, which is about 36.6 and also the national average, which is quite similar. The black Caribbean students in school had a progress rate of 0.1. Lambeth was 0.4, minus 0.48. And the national average was also a negative figure minus 0.0, 0.22. But I think that just to look at the data of black Caribbean students actually isn't the answer, because you have to think about the overlapping characteristics. So in our school last year in year 11, this cohort that we just talked about, we had 24 black Caribbean students out of a cohort of about 120 children. 21 of those children out of 24 were on free school meals. Two of them had education healthcare plans and 12 of them had SEN, some sort of special educational needs support. So that's over half of that group. And I think what's clear is that there is a need for like a multi-layered approach to achievement. And when you're looking at black Caribbean students, and I believe the picture is not just our school picture, but a Lambeth's wide picture, that there are overlapping characteristics that form multiple layers of disadvantage of these students. So what we've done. So I tried to get into five things, but unfortunately it's seven, so I quite like having five top five. So first of all, just the really easiest thing, focus on equity, removing socioeconomic barriers. And that's things like providing resources, providing tutoring in school, providing online tutoring for some of those really vulnerable children out of school in the evenings as well. Paying for uniform, paying for trips, all of the things that are an easy win. You know, just removing that barrier from children and their families. The second one, which is key and which is working with families and particularly those families who probably are less engaged with schools. And so we have we are very fortunate. We have full time family support workers in each year group who are our pastoral leads. We had last year we were given some money from the Lambeth School Partnership, which we use to support fund a specific staff member who had a remit to work with Black Caribbean students and families who had overlapping characteristics of SCND and people premium. We have academic achievement coordinators who are teachers in schools who work with the students on their academic achievement with the teachers. We have very regular parenting meetings and our SMT meets every single year 11 parents at least twice over the course of year 11. And for those children who are underachieving or fit those characteristics, those are more frequent meetings. And that really is to kind of put the whole school priority there and to cut through some of those layers of bureaucracy that exist even in a small school like ours to get to the crux of the issue with a parent and say, actually, no, you know, I'm their teacher. I can solve this for you. Number three, I think wider work on the curriculum, which is the long piece of work. So things like decolonizing, diversifying the curriculum, making sure it represents the history, stories and voices of our students, not just in the I don't say easy subjects like humanities and English where those are, you know, you can find those are those easier subjects to decolonize. But to really look through the curriculum at every subject, you know, for example, in science, who are the scientists that are champions? What is the skin tone of the diagrams that are used when you're explaining science to children? And what are the scientific, you know, discussions around? We have a notable unit. We talk about sickle cell, which is obviously a condition that affects predominantly obviously the black community and a number of our own children and their families as well. I think there is, you know, we do a lot of celebration for cultural and heritage. We have an Educate Empower Excel Day, which is our school motto where we look at advocacy, we look at privilege, we look at understanding how to be better allies of each other. We have key speakers, role models come in that look like our students and can celebrate their success. And then I think probably a lot of that is the important stuff. But the last three points are, I think, really getting to the issue. And I know we spoke earlier about representation at staff level, and I do think that that is a real key. I think, you know, we have had active recruitment of a really diverse support staff, teaching staff, middle management, senior management team. So about 66% of our teachers are from global majority ethnic groups or out of our SMT are from global majority ethnic groups as well. And I do think that that is really, you know, it's not just representation in the form of helping students to see themselves, but also representation in the form of having people who might have a lived experience that makes that whole process more of a community feel, a better sense of a belonging in schools that can really, you know, and educate those who don't have that lived experience as well. And how we've done that, obviously, we have had recruitment processes to do that. We've done training for support staff to get them into teaching, training for our teachers to get into middle and senior management. And we also have a very diverse governing body that has been a real active piece of work from our chair of governors, who, you know, which I think when everybody says the governing board helped to drive the school, that really does need to be a really diverse board as well. Next to, I think, you know, as a school, we need to make sure that our own internal bias and, you know, issues of racism, that individuals and I'm going to say staff might have doesn't compound low expectations or misreading of educational needs. So seeing a black child as a naughty person rather than a child that can't access the curriculum is a feature of schools. I'm just going to be honest. And, you know, there's a lot of staff. There's a lot of training out there. There's a lot of CPD that can be engaged with and we have engaged with. And the aim is to make the unconscious conscious and then once it's conscious, do something about it. I think a real focus on data has to back that up, scrutinising data and seeing where that is having impact and where it isn't. You know, where are global majority students, where are black boys still over represented in data that include behaviour data, suspensions, etc. And I think as a staff, there's been a move to make sure that we are not afraid to have those challenging conversations with each other at times when they are needed to be had. And then I think the final point really is to issue as yourself as a school leader and as an institution to really know that as a council as well. We are an institution and therefore we are not going to be free of systemic issues of systemic institutional racism and think, well, what are those in our school? And really look to seek those and look to seek advice on what those are. And some of those things will be scrutinising policies, obviously scrutinising the curriculum, looking at school organisations, structures, staffing, all of those things. And a couple of things that we've made purposeful change because of that, as an example. So first of all, we are now a total mixed ability school. We don't set in any subject, including maths and science. Data shows that when you set, bottom sets are predominantly black boys. And that they don't escape those bottom sets. They start in those bottom sets in year seven. And by year 11, they are those bottom sets and that has become their self-fulfilling prophecy. And also, we are a no grade school, so you wouldn't come to Lillian Bay this and we would in year seven and be told your key stage two says this. So your GCSE will be this. Our teachers don't judge children to flight paths. We don't have predicted grades based on key stage two that we say, oh, I'm really trying to get you a grade four, a grade five. I'm trying to get every child a grade nine. That's my ambition. You know, we might fall short of that ambition, but we've got to try. And I think that's really important because key stage two, the gaps are already there. So the way a lot of schools do it is they set a target from key stage two to key stage four. But if there's already a gap at key stage two, then you've anchored that child's achievement on a gap and you're going to, you know, you're never going to close a gap that you're just trying to aim to keep open. And that just creates an anchor for underachievement of those students. Thank you. That's wonderful. Questions from counsellors. I've got counsellor Armstrong first. I've got counsellor Brian to follow. Yeah, so as somebody who used to be a teacher, I agree, my path's terrible. They can't measure someone's success on how they did in key stage two. So how are they going to do it year 11? I agree with that. A few things I just wanted to pull out from the data. So 2.35 talks about how Black Caribbean and Portuguese were identified as underperforming in the 1990s. Obviously this is still an issue 35 years later. So I think it's been touched upon in what's just been said, but what are some of the underlying reasons for that? The second question is in relation to English as an additional language versus English as a secondary fluent language. Again, within the data, it showed that students who were English as a secondary fluent language were achieving higher than the average. And then in students with English as an additional language or achieving lower, particularly again within those sort of Portuguese backgrounds. When I used to teach in Lester in an initial school, what we sort of saw was the issue of students coming in at secondary school. Let's say year eight, nine from a non-UK based or non-English based country and therefore having to engage with the curriculum that has moved way beyond that in terms of developmental English. What they did in that school was they took the primary school level English lessons to bring them rapidly up to speed before they then start engaging with the curriculum. Again, completely conscious of the level of ability Lambeth has to intervene within schools. But what sort of work is being looked around that in terms of the effects of these English additional language students coming in at a later period and therefore not having the background of English education needed to necessarily engage with the curriculum. And so we don't have that much of this in the school anymore. We don't have a real shift away from children coming into secondary school with English as an additional language as movement of like refugees and people like that and people who've come across has been moved out of London. That has become a smaller and smaller group of children over time. You know, in our school we would use we have our EAL coordinator, we engage with tuition, we teach phonics, obviously not the primary school version of phonics, but you know, a secondary school version of phonics and decoding. But it will depend on the level of education that the child's had before they've arrived into your school as well. So it's difficult to give a kind of one size fits all answer. We have a very small number of students who fit that, which means that we can kind of do quite a bespoke package for each one. Yeah, and actually the performance of Portuguese speaking children at linear meals is quite impressive, like everything else in linear meals. But we have done quite a lot of work and the work that we've done through Lambert Schools Partnership and we call it so much initiative has focused particularly on Portuguese speaking children. And we're seeing those improvements. They all have champions in the schools. There's EAL coordinators. Faiza's team, but James, who's on the screen, his team, they do again training around teaching children with EAL specifically, as you said, kind of early speakers. But we've also expanded that program to include some of our Spanish speaking children. We saw that cohort emerging, but that's beginning to slow down now. And there's been a real focus on EAL and really standing up our EAL coordinators in schools to support children with early English. But we've also this is slightly separate, but we recognize also that with children coming in really late in the educational experiences. So Sophie's on the screen and her team have set up two international schools because what we tended to find is children would come in. It would be difficult to place them. They may have to go to college and actually for some of those children, they're academically able. They're just coming in with English as an additional language. We've set up two international schools across three, even in three secondary schools and Lambert has funded that. And that's particularly focused on children coming in as asylum seekers, children coming as refugees and having being non English speakers, because attending a main school, having a dedicated EAL teacher, but also being able to access the curriculum. So there's a lot of work going on there. I think to go back to the first part of the question, and I'm actually going to stress this, the underachievement of black Caribbean children is as old as Windrush. It has never changed. It's more than 35 years. And actually, there is one. It is institutional racism. I'm not afraid to say that in this room, there's structures and systems that have been built up in schools over time that haven't been challenged, haven't been addressed. And some of the things that Karen has said is the only way forward to have a cohort where half are SEN but still outperforming children who are non SEN tells you that it can be done. It starts with expectation. And if you go back to the report we looked at before, the number one influence of the children in schools, predominantly where the workforce didn't reflect them, was expectations. And if you come with those cultural biases and those expectations, they reinforce structural discrimination. So we have to recognise those biases, address them, not set, not put labels on children and also put early intervention in place because we find a lot of our children from ethnic minority black backgrounds oftentimes are either misdiagnosed for SEN or not diagnosed for SEN because they're just seen as naughty boys. So getting in early, we have set up an area team in education and we ran an exceptional needs grant pilot where schools could access support for children at the point of need. And the team actually worked really closely with SEN and young people and teachers to identify potential needs and support schools to apply for ACPs if it was appropriate to do so or any other type of SEN support required. So there is a lot of work that we're working in collaboration with schools on. But like I keep saying, there's a lot of work still to be done. And, you know, we're talking eight decades of work nationally that hasn't cracked it yet, but it can be done. Councillor Kine, do you want to jump in there? I was just going to say that. Everything that's really talking about, about the work that's being done is, despite the problem that has been there of the chronic underfunding of schools. Lambert School's had £40 million taken away from them over the last 15 years. Although that work that's being done that Karen has been talking about, the extra work really has been referencing, has been done on top of by the schools, by the education team. It is not with the extra funding that they should be having to do this work. We have made representations to the government for them to review that I think was a pretty outrageous decision 15 years ago, 14 years ago to shift the way that schools are funded to take away the needs based element that schools, particularly in central London, inner London, London more broadly, Manchester, Nottingham. It doesn't really matter which authority you're in, but the needs element being taken away because you could do so much more. So, you know, education is different to how it was last decade, the decade before, the decade before. It certainly isn't like it was when I went to school in the eighties. And the thing is that ultimately, if we had the money, we could make bigger shifts on some of this stuff. I think, you know, the very important side of this is not knowing the desire is there, the professionalism is there, the knowledge now of what to do, as Karen's outlined. And that's a real key part of this. And I can add to the point that there is a huge amount of self-funding, you know, writing bids, applying for all sorts of things, which there isn't a huge amount of success rates. But, you know, it's now a huge part of the job of the senior leadership team is to try and create money in the school. So educate children. It's almost like create your own business. But also actually, let's not forget the core business, which is actually making the children successful. So it's a very good point. Yeah. If you want to come back, councillor, I'm strong before I move on to councillor. Thank you very much. Mr Brian, and then councillor Adam. Sure. Thanks very much. That was brilliant. And yeah, it's great. Great school. I'm also an ex-teacher and I suppose grades allow enables. Yeah, great fixation. Anyway, but I suppose my question is mainly for a really strong. Looking at the report from last year. And it included information on, I know the schools are all anonymised. But it mentioned that last year the five were performing schools for all academies. And I'm just curious if in the future we can find out what the data is for this year, whether that's still the same. And also conceding the point that because we have a fractured education landscape, it's difficult to get academies to engage. And what was if it's still those five schools, what they're doing to engage and what's the part that can be changed, what they're doing to engage with our attempts to. Four brilliant answers. Yeah, technical about this. We're actually nearly five to nine. At this point, I have to say our committee normally we finish at nine. Actually, that's probably less often than we might like. But our committee members can tend to permit the meeting to be extended for up to 30 minutes, i.e. 9.30pm. Is that agreed? Agreed. Okay. Thanks. Sorry for jumping in there, but we can continue. Brilliant. So I would say that there's six schools that we focused on this year. There's been a bit of shift because I don't want to review which schools are which all of our one are academies. I don't think it's necessarily an academy versus a non-academy issue. You know, generally we find our LMNT and the secondaries are doing better, but there's other factors that influence that. So I think we just need to not reduce it to just it being academy versus non-academy because actually for me, you know, ultimately academies are a government structure. You know, leaders and teachers are there to, you know, make the best and ensure children have the best outcomes. Well, what's skewing our data quite significant because I think we also have to highlight the positives. But secondary data is not where it should be. And I'm going to say that in this room, you know, we are the worst performing compared to our statistical neighbors in London. And that's not a data set that we're proud of. And we have set really high challenges for secondary schools and they're on board. And one of the things we've done this year in the past, it was difficult to get all of our secondary schools signed up to the partnership. Again, because some academies, they have their own systems of school improvement and support. So for them, the cost didn't feel like it was worthwhile. So we pay for it ourselves. So all our secondary schools automatically have membership now in the Lambert Schools Partnership. And that was welcomed and we established our secondary schools forum, which Karen chairs. And we have really good participation and attendance. We meet six times a year and there's been a real focus on school improvement. We released extra funding to our secondary schools to close the gap, particularly for black Caribbean children, which should close the achievement gap. And they've signed up to that. They agree to that. They put in proposals as to how they're going to do that. So there's some now, I don't want to use accountability, but there's that greater scrutiny and relationship with our secondary schools, which I think was much needed of our secondary schools that aren't where they should be. And this year we thought there were six that hit that criteria. We've had challenge meetings actually, they happened last week. And again, it was sitting with heads, with leaders of trust where it's applied and setting really high standards and expectations, but also understanding where it went wrong, because for some of them and we've seen, and I'm going to say this in this room, one of the biggest drivers and impact on people outcomes, this is poverty. And most of our children who are not performing, you know, live in our most vulnerable areas and, you know, make up the lowest socioeconomic band in our borough. So we have to look at things like housing. We have to look at, you know, work that we do with DWP. You know, yes, children get free school means funding, but it's not just that. And also we have to look at sometimes where, you know, the pool for some of our communities. But the biggest other influence that we saw in some of our performing schools was attendance, because then those children and young people are also not attending school. So they're not accessing really. And in one school, you know, their non-attenders, those who persistently absent, which was more than 90%, was about a third of the GCSE cohort. So there's no way that school is ever going to perform well if so many of their children and young people want to be accessing school all the time. So we have to, we've stood up and expanded our education and well-of-the-officer team. And actually, for some of our schools that have particular challenges around attendance, we're delivering that for free. Some can trade. All of our primary schools will have a free service as part of the work that we're doing again from Lambert. And that's to prevent children becoming non-attenders as they go into secondary school. So as we begin to be more proactive and address those issues, we believe we will begin to see improvements. But our secondary data is improving. Our progress data is improving. Minimal, but it's improving. And we must call success where we see it. Where our challenge is our nine to fives. We really need to do some work in getting children those higher grades. And that's where our statistical neighbours outperform us. The children need better grades statistically. And that for us has to be a real driver. But there's also five schools doing exceptionally well. And we have to recognise those schools who are doing really well and absolutely superseding every single data set. National, statistical neighbour, London, the list is long. So we have a real dichotomy of experiences. And when you drill down into the data, I would say the biggest influences are poverty, locality and attendance. And that's where I've done. That's a big question. It's inspiring. The really painiest of mine. My daughter got to Elmgren. I was always used to both that. And I've got a school that I don't even do great in, which is just incredible. And I see the value in it. I just, they get struggling for the guests. Because we know who gets at the bottom. But on top of that, what I find is about the SEN, especially the ANGLE. And what, do you do any extra support for teachers to be able to have those conversations? Because I find it's in schools unless... So when I work at the youth club, they can't, they're 12, 13, 14, they can't find their names. And they've been excluded eventually, but they weren't diagnosed because they weren't taking off. They weren't giving them too much grief, so they just costed a little bit. And teachers, I don't know how much training they've given about this year, then diagnosis. In teacher training, my sister's a teacher. We didn't have much training on it, but it's that unless someone is just obviously struggling and disruptive or something, what support do you give, like, of teachers to be able to have that conversation with these teachers? I think that might be something because the undiagnosed neurodifest. But I don't know. Maybe it's because it's compounded with poverty. It disproportionately affects children from my university background. And that's neurodiversity. There's a parental neurodiversity, so what kind of support do you... with all the local authorities, with schools to give you help, especially private schools? Because what I find is, if you start the process in secondary school, you're interested in CER, which is... So you've got to get your EHCPs ideally, or whatever extra support, even as in private schools, so you get in private. What can the local authorities do with absence of the national education teacher training? You're not equipped to just do... I see, what can the local authorities do? You're not like to support teachers and CERCOS to support that. It's just... Because I know it's a money issue because schools have to be... We're doing a lot, and there are officers on the screen, but I don't know if they can come in. You know, Sophie Garner, who's on the screen, she's just putting a camera on. She's all AD for inclusion, so she... I've alluded to some of it, but I know she'll be very proud to tell you some of the work that's happening in CERCOS and then to support schools, so Sophie, you can come in. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're really proud of the work we've been doing around CERCOS and supporting our CERCOS. We have a really well-attended CERCOS network, which is coordinated by our Area CERCOS team, which is a new team that we've grown to really support CERCOS in school. And that's all our schools. We don't discriminate in terms of academies or maintained. We open that out to all our schools to be able to have that support as CERCOS, and they come and we deliver different sessions. We have therapists, specialists come in to deliver sessions as well in terms of identification. And we also have primary and secondary. We also offer drop-ins for our secondary specifically because we know that we haven't had the... We're working really hard on increasing the uptake of our secondary CERCOS attending. And so we work with having a drop-in session because we know that they often will have teaching loads. So we will work around them to support them, whether it be strategically looking at policies or whether it's about individual children and families and supporting those individual children and families. We are just launching what is our ordinarily available provision, which is what every school should provide for any child with additional needs. So not just IEHCP children, young people, but our children, young people with SEND support. And that is a toolkit that we're launching on our local offer that's been developed by Area CERCOS team as well. So that's to really enable it to have consistency across our schools. In terms of outcomes, our EHCP children, young people do well at Key Stage 4, but it's actually our SEND support that is our key target area. And we have just set up a working party with our key schools that are doing really well with our SEND support and have positive outcomes so that we can further support our other schools to have that consistency by doing peer support. And it's been really positive to have a really good response from those schools that are having those positive outcomes with SEND support to be able to offer to help our other schools that may need extra support around how do you ensure, for example, attendance is strong in SEND support, but also that that reflects in terms of outcomes for SEND support. We have quite a broad range in terms of our outreach teams as well. And we've also strengthened our autism outreach team because that is our biggest need within the borough alongside SLCM, which often leads to a diagnosis of autism. So we have developed that and we've become an Autism Educational Trust, which we offer a train the trainer so that schools can actually train their staff to become to deliver the training themselves. We know it's really important to empower the schools themselves to be able to deliver quality first teaching training to their staff. So rather than just having staff come in and deliver a one off training, we know that it's really important to do the trainer training model, where we train key members of staff in schools so they can do continuous training to their staff. Thanks so much. Do you wish to come back on that, Councillor? I don't know. We've got Councillor Bryant and I'll ask one last question and then we'll move to close. Yeah, there's a huge amount of data in this report. I think that particularly left off the page to me was some statistics around children or pupils from Portuguese ethnic background. And there seems to be a sort of mixed message here in that on the positive side, it was saying at Key Stage 2, the performance had increased going from 22 to 24. But at GCSE, the English for maths, it seems to have just completely fallen off the cliff. So it's gone from 72% to only 45% of the grade four and above. I was just wondering if there's, you know, what might be, because it seems to be sort of the bits before, why they seem to be suddenly performing worse when they get to the secondary school and what could be done about to address that? On numbers, so I always have to correct and say it's Portuguese speaking, pupils. We did look at that because we felt last year that was an anomaly because we know it's a group we've been targeting for some time. So we were quite pleased actually when we saw the outcomes. But when we identified it, it was a small cohort that was predominantly in a school. So I think it's again looking at best practice and when we have them spread across more schools, we tend to find that that variation in data again. So there's still work to do to ensure that consistently Portuguese speaking children do well and the consistency that's the issue. And then oftentimes you'll find some cohorts are just higher prior attainers as they come in. So they'll tend to do better later on and the small numbers sometimes influence the outcomes as well. So there still would be done there. And I think when we got the data last year, we were really clear and saying to schools, you know, this may be an anomaly and let's not take it as a security measure for Portuguese speaking children. But there's still a core group that we've focused on as part of the LSP work. So we've got the SOMOS programme. Yeah. But does that actually work at all stages through? It does. So that is in secondary schools. Yeah. You know, and we've said it here and I'll keep saying it. Our children generally at key stage do well. We still have to improve our outcomes against our statistical neighbours everywhere. But generally, you know, and I say this to secondary schools and they don't always like me saying it, but our children leave primary school usually in a solid place. They have a compared to national averages. They have a really strong foundation. So we do see gaps present themselves. We do need to obviously recognise mobility in data as well because some children start late in secondary school as reflected in year 11. But we have to really begin to hold ourselves to account as a board for why our children leave in a strong place. They're well above national. And then it seems so long as they go through our secondary schools. We can't accept it. I have to also say there are still some secondary schools doing exceptionally well. So there's still that relationship between what schools children may attend and their outcomes. And we know the biggest drivers for those schools are children with, you know, significant needs, policy attendance issues. And I feel like I always have to stress this point in every meeting when we talk about black children's outcome. And Karen is bored of me saying it, you know, it is black Caribbean children, black African children are one of our top fours in every measure. And I think for me, just looking at the data, but potentially looking at it anecdotally, we have to consider the factors behind black Caribbean children's outcomes and why they're different. And it is things like poverty. It's family structure is, you know, and I'll give you a really simple anecdote in one of the meetings we had last week. One of the head teachers was saying to me, we're really struggling with our parents of black Caribbean background. You know, they don't come to parents evening. You know, we can't get them in your room and we know family engagement is so important. And I just said, can we just stop for a second? And I said, you're trying to apply. And I said, it's a middle class measuring stick to a community where it's not going to work. So I am a black Caribbean mother. I am a single black Caribbean mother. I am a working black Caribbean mother. I am in London right now in a meeting and my daughter is home alone. If she had parents evening, I couldn't attend. I said, but last week when she didn't hand in her English coursework, her teacher called me. It was in the next day. And I said, sometimes you have to go beyond the norm. And instead of always expecting parents to come in, you have to reach out. And the penny dropped for him. It just dropped. And he said, we just need to call more parents. And I think sometimes, and that's where the structural discrimination, sometimes really subtle, but it presents itself. And that simple phone call to me as a working black Caribbean mother made a difference to my child's outcome. Because the school went beyond just expecting me to sit next to her and check she'd done her coursework. So I think it's those little systems that we have to work with schools and get them to recognize their behavior systems, their policy around parental engagement, how they engage with communities. Sometimes they present their own barriers that they have to overcome, but it's not intentional. It's sometimes just changing the measure and stick for the communities they're working with, because some of our black African context may be very different in terms of family structure, where they live. Again, socioeconomic background and so on. Sorry. I'm going to come off my soap. I'm going to come back on that, Councillor Bryant. Are you okay? I'm going to ask one last question. It comes from a discussion I had with Faisa over a year ago. It's really over literacy of speaking English and reading and writing. Do we really do enough for those children who don't? For whatever reason, be it as a second language or just it hasn't happened before. Do we do enough for those? Because Faisa said it was one of the sort of indicators that if you didn't have fluent English and reading and writing, that was an indicator that you weren't going to do well and probably the biggest indicator. The data is saying primary schools are closing those gaps. That's all we can depend on. We have some work to do with phonics because of phonics, I would say is probably one of our weakest indicators at primary level. But those children make up by the time they get to key stage two. We're seeing those stronger outcomes, but it's still an underperforming group. So there's still work to be done there, which is why we've established this as part of the LSP initiative. We've set up EAL coordinators. We've run out of time, but there's a lot of work we're doing in that area now to ensure that every school has an EAL coordinator. They recognize who that group is and they put specific interventions in place. And we actually send that data out to school to ensure that they know who those children are. All schools are now doing EAL tests and they do EAL tests so that they know exactly where those children are so that they can monitor their progress as well in terms of language acquisition. And that's a core part of what schools do in Lumber. Thank you. Got any more questions? Thank you to the officers and on recommendations. I've got no other report. Is there anything anyone else wishes to specifically put in there? It is a fairly comprehensive and you've had the responses verbally as well. Let me just note the report down and thanks very much. Karen for coming along and late, it must be a late night for you. And I know we found it interesting in all the other stuff that we did as well. And moving very quickly on. So we just have a very quick last item. It's the item seven, the work programme, pages 197 to 2 from 10. But just to note that our programme is a live document. We change throughout the year, but I'm not going to ask that anything we're going to do going forward because there's the AGM of the council coming up and there will be a programming mid session. Once the membership for the CS SSC has been confirmed at April AGM. So it will be members of the subcommittee. Then we'll be setting the programme for the year going forward. So we don't need to do anything else. It's fine. So I'll just say. Unless anybody else wishes to add anything in there on that. So thanks so much everyone. It's been a really, really interesting night. Goodbye. Thank you. Thank you.