The Children and Young People Scrutiny Committee met to discuss persistent absence in schools, receive an executive member report, and review the committee's work programme. The committee heard evidence from Place2Be on persistent absence in secondary schools, received an update on attendance, and were introduced to emotional-based school non-attendance.

Persistent Absence in Secondary Schools

The committee continued its review of persistent absence in secondary schools, hearing witness evidence from Angel Strachan, Policy and Public Affairs Manager, and Shanice Britton, Area Manager, at Place2Be, a children's mental health charity. Place2Be representatives told the committee that one in five children across the country are persistently absent from school, missing around 10% of their sessions. They added that missing school has many negative effects that can impact a child through adolescence and into adulthood, and that children not attending school are likely to lose peer connections, community access to food, safety and trusted adults.

Place2Be representatives stated that current approaches to attendance fail to tackle the root cause and that some schools are more driven by Ofsted¹, government and external factors, than pupil wellbeing and inclusion. They presented research from Place2Be and the University of Cambridge which indicated that school-based one-to-one counselling has the potential for an 18.5% reduced likelihood of a pupil having persistent absence, and that 78% of 4-11 year olds and 91% of 11-18 years olds had improved mental health after they had support through 1:1 counselling.

Place2Be's service outcomes in Islington for 2023-24 included 549 children and young people supported in targeted intervention, a 74% improvement according to teachers or parents, and 64% improvement in classroom learning.

In regards to persistent absence in secondary schools, Place2Be recommended:

• a whole school approach to mental health, focusing on inclusion, enrichment, anti-bullying and mental health
• local collaboration and joined up working
• support, funding and resources for organisations improving school attendance
• earlier identification, better data and support for families
• expanding access to special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and mental health provision in schools and community, and training for school staff.

In response to questions from the committee, Place2Be representatives said that they would circulate figures on the percentage of children they worked with in Islington that needed assistance regarding SEND.

Executive Member Report

Councillor Micheline Safi-Ngongo, Executive Member for Children, Young People and Families, presented her report to the committee. She stated that the Child Friendly Islington mission seeks to ensure the child is at the centre of every decision and that there is a joint and unified approach between the local authority, schools and families to ensure that young people have a safe place to call home.

Councillor Safi-Ngongo stated that both the Director of Children's Service and Executive Member have a statutory duty and responsibility for every child within the borough, but that the Executive Member leads the political aspect in terms of the vision and responsibility.

She reported that Children's Services is a complex unit, comprising of three primary divisions: Safeguarding and Family Support; Learning and Achievement and Young Islington. All three areas are interlinked and work collaboratively alongside each other which enables effective early intervention and single points of contact.

The framework for Child Friendly Islington will be presented to the committee at its next meeting in February 2025. This will outline how all partners are working towards a shared, clear vision for the borough's children, capturing the voice of everyone involved and identifying areas for improvement. Child Friendly Islington includes being a Baby Friendly Islington, advocating for children that cannot speak for themselves and who could also face potential harm or suffering as much as older children.

Councillor Safi-Ngongo told the committee that she was proud that the majority of the borough's schools were rated good and outstanding but that more still needed to be done to ensure there continued to be positive outcomes for Islington's more vulnerable children and young people.

The scrutiny committee's report into persistent absence in secondary schools, together with the call to arms on attendance and national best practice, will inform the strategy on tackling attendance going forward. The School Organisation Plan was in its third phase and that it was an unfortunate but necessary measure to address rising school deficits and falling rolls.

Councillor Safi-Ngongo congratulated the Youth Justice Team on being rated outstanding by Ofsted inspectors and acknowledged there was still more work to be done, particularly to support the new Youth Justice strategy and ensure it captures the voice of everyone.

It was another key priority to ensure that all young people progress to independent and fulfilled lives in adulthood, but that there were some challenges in securing housing for care leavers that sometimes delayed this cohort in their transition. Councillor Safi-Ngongo told the committee that they were working alongside Housing colleagues to secure additional housing supply for care leavers. There were to be changes in the Children's Social Care policy, and this will be reported a future meeting of the scrutiny committee.

In response to questions from members about which three initiatives the Executive Member was proud of achieving, Councillor Safi-Ngongo stated that they were proud of the Childcare offer, the Youth Hub offer and Baby Friendly Islington.

In response to members questions about the location of the borough's family hubs, the Executive Member advised that they were Islington Family Hub Central at New River Green Children's Centre, Family Hub South at Bemerton Children's Centre, and Family Hub North at Hornsey Road Children's Centre.

In response to members questions regarding the timeline, delivery and engagement with young people on the Child Friendly Islington framework, the Executive Member advised that young people had been engaged with, that the launch was well-attended although it was online and that more details about the framework would be presented to the next meeting. Additionally, the Executive Member stated that there was no funding to commission external auditors and that the outcome for the borough's young people was the most important priority. The Executive Member went on to state that in terms of how the impact to young people would be measured, that this would be primarily monitored through the Executive, but also within senior leadership and the Youth Council.

Officers were asked to provide data for the past three years on the number of children known to the Youth Justice Service, the number of children arrested in Islington, the number of children who have been a victim of crime in Islington, and the number excluded from schools due to behaviour and/or arrest.

Attendance Update

Officers presented an update on attendance to the committee, stating that there were five concurrent strands of work addressing persistent absence in secondary schools: the attendance mentors; the call to action; the scrutiny review into persistent absence at secondary schools; the school attendance support team and targeted support and quality assurance.

Officers recognised that across Islington there remained significant challenges regarding persistent absenteeism. Officers had visited over fifty schools over a short period, to attain a deeper understanding of the challenges and brief staff on the new attendance codes and available support. The visits had helped officers to identify common challenges, barriers to attendance and areas of support needed, which had overall helped officers to inform their approach to the attendance strands and strategies going forward. A workshop, held in October 2024, had also helped with this learning.

Officers stated that they were supporting schools by commissioning attendance data profiles to assist chairs of governors. Progress continued to be made with the attendance mentor programme. The specification had been developed and services within the Council invited to deliver the programme, with Bright Futures chosen in December 2024. Officers further stated that an additional bid of £25,000 of funding was made to the Mayor of London for additional funding to train attendance mentors, and that their visits to schools had helped them to identify families that would benefit from the programme of targeted intervention from attendance mentors.

It was a requirement of statutory guidance on improving attendance, that Local Authority school attendance teams provided targeted supported meetings to its schools. Officers further stated that locally in Islington, they ensured such meetings were consistent, useful and data driven, by ensuring that the school attendance team was regularly trained, that best practice on in-school interventions for improving attendance were collated and shared at these meetings, and that termly visits to each school, continued.

Officers stated that national research had identified patterns in attendance at primary school that had shown that parents had indicated a need for more support from schools to overcome barriers to school attendance and that sometimes, parental attitudes itself, to education, was a barrier and that since COVID-19, there had been an overall decline in the perceived importance and value of attending school every day. Officers further stated that these patterns had been corroborated in their visits but that there had also been findings that pointed to a rise in anxiety among parents as well as young people and families travelling longer distances due to the housing crisis. Members were told that research had underlined that a welcoming environment which provided engaging learning opportunities and a strong sense of belonging in schools was crucial to overcoming the barriers and improving school attendance. It was stated to members that schools with better attendance also had strong community links and staff dedicated to monitoring attendance.

Officers stated that there had also been significant good practice and effective strategies identified in both research and their visits. but also some areas for improvement such as that some schools could benefit from implementing a support first approach over statutory intervention, that there was sometimes a negative attitude to change sometimes a reluctance to use existing resources to tackle attendance.

In response to questions from members about whether the local authority had data for all schools, including academies, officers advised that they had the data locally but all schools were now obligated to upload data centrally to the Department for Education (DfE) which officers can then access.

In response to questions from members about whether parental trauma is affecting children and young people's attendance, officers advised that there were a range of factors that affected attendance and that this would be information that the individual schools would be able to determine.

In response to member concerns that the report omitted SEND and implied parental fault, officers stated that the framework had begun with capturing the views of schools on policy and that the voice of parents had been sought and captured in the programme of work, but that officers were looking to increase the reach of those that they engaged with in the coming months. It was also stated in response to members concerns about missing data, that the data in the report is all that was provided by the schools to officers. It was further stated that it was unlikely that the school would say that a child was absent due to undiagnosed needs in reporting, but mental health was a factor that had been mentioned frequently.

In response to member questions on what support there would be for those below the 80-90% attendance figure, officers advised that although Islington had performed poorly against other local authorities on persistent absence, for severe absence it had fared better and that the targeted support of the attendance mentors programme would release capacity from elsewhere in the system to focus on those families where poor was more entrenched.

Officers stated that it was their intention to repurpose the Access and Engagement service to be focus more on advice and collaboration with schools to promote support services.

In response to members questions about how officers had engaged with parents, officers stated that Bright Futures had worked in partnership with parents on family hubs and that there had been more engagement activity than what had been reported to.

Officers advised that Bright Futures would continue their work in schools in conjunction with the Attendance Mentors programme which was targeted and specific work.

In response to questions from the public regarding how the Council would ensure there was a deep listening exercise with parents to inform how attendance was addressed, officers stated that it was important to hear from children and their parents and that this was only the first phase, and that there would be opportunities going forward to further capture parents' voice.

Introduction to Emotional Based School Non-Attendance (EBSNA)

Officers presented the Introduction to Emotional Based School Non-Attendance (EBSA) to the committee. Members were told that an Islington working group had developed an EBSA protocol to support schools in understanding and meeting the needs of non-attenders. This was about to pass through the SEND partnership board, and a further version of this would be shared with the schools, who had already received an earlier draft form. It was further stated that the reason it had taken a long time was because there had been several factors in the previous few years, such as the COVID-19 Pandemic, increased mental health needs, rising cost of living, rising anxiety children parents, and higher diagnoses of autism, which had affected wellbeing and attendance.

Members were told that was a shift from terminology that implied a problem with the child to language focusing on the factors and emotional barriers for children to attend school instead. This was one of the factors behind the adoption of the term EBSNA (Emotional Based School Non-Attendance) over EBSA (Emotional Based School Avoidance).

Members were told that EBSNA was not a diagnosis and as such there was no diagnostic criteria for EBSA; it was a description of children who were not attending school due to anxiety or emotional factors (which may have multiple causes) and it was important to understand what was going on in the child's life.

Members were told that there was research that had identified the four main areas of non-attendance: to avoid uncomfortable feelings brought on by attending school, such as feelings of anxiety, low mood, or low self-esteem; to avoid situations that might be stressful, such as academic demands, social pressures and/or aspects of the school environment; to reduce separation anxiety or to gain attention from significant others, such as parents or other family members; or to pursue tangible reinforcers, meet up with peers, and/or gaming during the night which can cause sleep deprivation.

Members were told that it was important to put interventions in place to support children into going to school to meet their emotional needs. Examples included cognitive behavioural approaches, systematic re-exposure and less anxiety inducing activities. Officers stated that the protocol identified which staff and services may be involved, which could be the school wellbeing service providing individual or small group interventions for mild to moderate anxiety needs; NRC Outreach and/or CAMHS depending on need. It was further stated that where children were not attending due to the school environment, sensory need, or undiagnosed needs, officers would consider adaptations and interventions to the child's school environment to meet their needs and enable them to access learning flexibly. It was stressed to members that there was no blanket intervention that suited all but there was a need to engage children into seeing the emotional benefit of attending school.

In response to members questions about schools where best practice was not being followed and where schools were punitively withdrawing education against the family's wishes, officers stated that they were working closely with New River College outreach, and were looking to see evidence of good practice in Islington schools and that there were plans for a wider training programme. In response, members stressed that they would still like to see evidence that schools were following this practice, and that there was accountability locally when it was not being met.

In response to member questions regarding space in schools for calm spaces and how impactful they were, officers advised that they were about to embark on a capital works programme and that thirty-two schools had put in successful bids for reflection spaces. It was further stated that this would be accompanied by training and engagement and that the Council was increasingly diverse needs of our community.

Officers were asked to provide overall staffing numbers for New River College Outreach and to inform the committee how the implementation of the EBSNA protocol is progressing at a future meeting of the committee.

Work Programme

The committee noted the Work Programme 2024-25.