Sustainability: What future for extended services?

Hi Everyone

Discussions on this website reveal lots of questions about the future:

- are we moving away from the term extended services?

- how do they fit with the wider prevention agenda?

- are schools moving resources back to teaching and learning?

- what is the future role for extended services co-ordinators?

I have been asked by Continyou to develop guidance on sustainability which will be available here on the Learning Exchange from April.  The plan is to provide a routemap to useful resources and advice, together with case studies.  I want to ensure that the paper includes the issues you want to address, so welcome comments, ideas and particularly case studies through this forum.

The project proposal covers the following topics:

- what do we mean by sustainability?

- maximising partnership working for sustainability.

- embedding cluster arrangements and school to school partnerships.

- working with the 3rd sector and with volunteers.

- formalising structures, including commissioning, charity registration, social enterprise and community interest companies.

- takeing a whole family approach.

- identifying need.

- measuring impact, linking to key local targets, school objectives and processes, including the SEF and Ofsted inspections.

- developing a strategy for sustainability.

Although, these issues will touch on finance, the intent is not to provide a resource on fundraising, but rather to demonstrate how building onto existing partnerships and identified need can reduce dependency on external funding streams.

So do let me know via this forum..are there topics missing from this list, what issues would you like to see covered, and can you provide case studies to evidence good practice?

I look forward to hearing from you over the next 2 weeks in order to meet the timescales for this project.

Carol, I'm attaching an article called Making it through the wobble by Neil Irwin from the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action, which I commissioned for ETC magazine just last year. It's about Northern Ireland and though I know you are only touching on the financial aspects of building sustainable services in your document, the article does have some good points to make which extended services practitioners might want to note.  Hope that's helpful. I'll dig out more stuff if I can.

View attachment

Neil makes some very useful points in a very readable article.  Particularly important, is his advice to diversify funding sources, rather than relying on one major funder.  He encourages schools to register their extended services as a charity or to partner with an existing charity to raise funding.  I will explore these options further in the guidance if that would be helpful to readers, together with alternative governance models.

Another quick note for you Carol: I just spoke to Diane Greaves in Northtyneside who has made the crucial point that sustainability needs to be linked to the Total Place agenda which will, increasingly, be key for chief executives in the statutory sector.  The more I read about Total Place - and also community trust schools - the more I think that this is where extended services need to find a niche. But Diane is happy for you to call her and chat about this. Here are two useful pages you could visit on the Learning Exchange:

Total Place: more for less? where will extended services fit into this picture

Clusters: future development and sustainability of extended services - ways forward

Thank you Simon and Paddy for your helpful points.

I think the issue Simon raises of bringing together data from different sources, all of which evidences and confirms the same needs, is absolutely crucial.  It reinforces important points about ensuring service planning is embedded in a data driven understanding of community issues, which is triangulated through different sources, but also emphasises the strength of partnership working which is clearly focussed on addressing community issues together, rather than simply creating opportunities for discussion.

Focusing our partnership work, is  I believe, a cricual task for the next stage of service development, and that may mean formalising informal arrangements, working together on short-term projects, and sometimes withdrawing from partnerships which are not focussed on the objectives we need to achieve.

Does anyone have further thoughts building on existing partnership working for sustainability?

Next week we will be looking specifically at the SE Cluster Managers Networking event on Sustainability. I will be interested to see how the SE Cluster Managers take a look at some of those questions that Carol's work on sustainability for ContinYou has posed for us.

I am particularly interested is sustaining and not losing (due to lack of funding or planning) the excellent work that has been done. My background in regeneration work in communities has seen that the skills and efforts of individuals often gets lost when the funding regime stops. This needs to be integrated and planned for so that the role of the Cluster Manager is seen as important, not for the individual and their jobs, but for the added value extended services brings to the lives of children, families and the communities where opportunities have previously been in short supply. We need to remember the Rowntree Report that says that 85% of a childs time is spent outside school,  the work we can do together to support learning at home, family learning and learning communities will be an accelerator for the joy and interest of learning, for life skills for the long term.

Christina, I agree that continuing the co-ordination role is crucial for a coherent approach across services.  Sadly, it is often difficult to fund such roles when pump-priming comes to an end.  Does anyone have an example of drawing in external funding specifically to continue cluster management?

Hi, we also have an Collaborative Leadership Committee model, Ours is named the Full Service Extended School Federated Body and consists of 1 head teacher from the cluster of schools, a Governor from each school, 2 Deputy head teachers, Family Support workers and Assistant Head of service for Children and Young people in Derby.  This has been in operation for over four years and works extremely well. They take overall responsibility of the operation and legal accountability of our Extended School and provide support and guidence when necessary.  This then feeds back into each schools governing Body for retification.  I had never thought of looking into registering as a limited compant, nor applying for charitable status, so has given me food for thought. Thank you

V 

Hi Victoria. It would be really helpful to understand the nature of the agreement made by the schools within the collaborative leadership committee.  Is there a formal partnership agreement?  Does the committee hold funding on behalf of all schools, or does one of the schools hold funding?  Are there written protocols for committee processes and decision-making, or has this relied on goodwill and the commitment and enthusiasm of the group?

I'm sure this experience will be useful to readers.

Having problems accessing the thread, It wont let me see the contuning thread and when i click on the reply in my profile bit it wont show the thread!!! very strange, so please dont think im ignoring anyone! Thanks V