Transcript Susanne Koen Infoquest Pty Ltd Qualitative research  Anecdotal  Snapshots  Voices, but not all voices  Interviews in all three areas, DECS and non-DECS schools,

Susanne Koen
Infoquest Pty Ltd
Qualitative research
 Anecdotal
 Snapshots
 Voices, but not all voices
 Interviews in all three areas, DECS and non-DECS
schools, from students with learning disabilities to
those with high-end complex needs
 Captured issues raised, responses, requests, examples
of good practice
 Biggest issue for all stakeholders:
TIME!
Purpose of Better Pathways project
‘…early assessment of the young person’s capacity to learn, so
that an individual plan can be developed that will lead them
down realistic post-school pathways.’
Social Inclusion Board (2009)Choices and connections, p.37
Making it central
Issue: How does Better Pathways contribute to our
school meeting its site priorities?
 ‘It’s so much work, it might get in the way of us working towards
the things that are really important to us.’
 ‘If it isn’t central, we won’t get it done.’
Making it central
Strategies: Get leadership on board
‘We entered in 100% because any extra help that we can get for these
kids, helps them to stay in school and achieve, and therefore helps
us as a school to help them.’
School AP
Making it manageable
Issue: How are we better able to get Better Pathways to
contribute to and add value to existing programs?
 The number of support programs offered to kids makes it highly
time demanding: ‘each year it gets harder and harder because it’s
extra workload’.
Making it manageable
Strategies: Streamline the programs
 ‘We draw together all the different student plans, including any
plan created by Better Pathways, to create one school plan.’
School Principal
 Workload decreases with familiarity:
‘This year’s been easier, but that’s also because I’ve done it three
times now.’
School AP
Who needs to know?
Issue: How do we improve communications within
our school?
 Issue 1: Information not always getting through to people who
need to know, particularly when students are transitioning to
next year level
 Issue 2: Teachers don’t have much familiarity with the program or
understand the benefits
Who needs to know?
Transitioning year levels
Issue 1:
 Sometimes year level coordinators are not aware of Better
Pathways students at the start of the year
Who needs to know?
Transitioning year levels
Strategies: Better information flow
 As a group—Better Pathways folder which identifies all students
in year level and is handed on to next year level coordinator
 Individuals—transition form that stays with the student as they
move from year to year to improve continuity
 Regular review meetings to include Better Pathways worker,
school contact person and year level coordinator
Who needs to know?
Teacher awareness
Issue 2: Teachers don’t have much familiarity with the
program or understand the benefits
 ‘…for the first time, he was successful, but when he went back into
the classroom, the teacher wasn’t aware of it and things happened
all over again.’
 ‘Everybody is so busy, sometimes they forget that maybe this is a
BP kid – sometimes they don’t even think “this is a kid with a
disability”.’
Who needs to know?
Teacher awareness
Strategy: Awareness raising of BP and the benefits
for students
 Provide regular updates at staff meetings:
‘the staff understand what Better Pathways is and that students
have a mentor to help them transition’
School AP
Communications:
Better Pathways and school
Issue: How do we improve communications between
Better Pathways and schools to better support
students?
‘Relationship with the school is the core fibre of what supports the
student.’
‘There’s nothing worse than having to wait 3 months for a meeting
to discuss something that should have been attended to at the
time.’
‘The big barrier in secondary schools is communication… people
get confused about what information you can share and what’s
confidential.’
Better Pathways workers
Communications:
Better Pathways and school
Strategies (Better Pathways): Regular meetings to
make linkage, build relationship, align support and
discuss how students are travelling
Monthly meetings benefit students by:
 promoting more timely responses to incidents like detention,
non-attendance
 facilitating communications and involvement, like subject
selection, transition planning
Communications:
Better Pathways and school
Strategies (Better Pathways): Gain greater
awareness of connections between support already
being offered and educational requirements
Acting as mentors, BP workers are often supporting kids in ways
which could contribute to educational attainment (elaborated
on later in presentation)
Communications:
Better Pathways and school
Strategies (Better Pathways): Gain greater
connectedness to support parents and families in
school requirements
Familiarising and preparing students and families for review
meetings in advance
‘If they’ve got any questions, they can talk them through with us
and write them down, because once they’re in the environment
(the school meeting), they start to close down.’
BP worker
Communications:
Better Pathways and school
Strategies (Better Pathways): Improve
communications and wrap-around support
Termly collaborative meetings
‘All the workers who are supporting students go out to the school
and meet with all the teachers involved with the students and we
discuss each student in turn.’
BP coordinator
‘Sometimes we know things that the school doesn’t and the school
might know other things.’
BP worker
Communications:
Better Pathways and school
Strategies (schools): Regular email reporting
Email reports monthly or termly
‘Email would really help me manage better because of the
flexibility to get around to it…catching up face to face is too
difficult from a time perspective.’
School AP
Communications:
Better Pathways and school
Strategies (schools): Information sharing
‘The systems don’t support good communications around students.
We need a system that will let us put in and share information
and upload things like a PLP.’
School contact person
‘We’ve set up a pigeon hole for the BP workers to tell them about
the students, eg to let them know J…. has been suspended.
Maybe the team leader could come in each week and empty it.’
School contact person
Communications:
Better Pathways and school
Strategies (schools): Sharing and understanding
culture
 ‘I really appreciate the opportunity to sit on the BP panels and be
part of that because then I understand more about how they
work.’
School AP
START assessment
Purpose of Better Pathways project
‘…early assessment of the young person’s capacity to
learn, so that an individual plan can be developed that will
lead them down realistic post-school pathways.’
Social Inclusion Board (2009)Choices and connections, p.37
START assessment
Question: Why have the START tool if you can already
identify the kids?
 ‘We know our kids really well, but I wouldn’t have picked out
some of them, especially the quiet ones.’
 ‘Students have a chance to have their voices included.’
 ‘We shouldn’t make decisions about kids – they can identify stuff
for themselves.’
School contact people/APs
START assessment
Issues:
1.
Timing of the assessment
2. Format of the tool
3.
Increasing efficiency
4. Greater accuracy
Elaborations:
1.
2.
3.
4.
When is the ‘best’ time to
administer the test?
What is the best way to
administer the test—
electronic or print? How do we
make it more user-friendly?
How can we reduce teacher
admin time to make it less
labour intensive?
How can we ensure responses
come from teachers who know
the kids?
START assessment:
Timing—year 8 or 9?
Argument:
End of Year 8 because:
 high staff turnover means teachers starting with them in year 9
may not know the kids
 ‘I strongly advocated for testing in year 8 so they can get started
as soon as possible—if they’re going to go off track, it will be in
Year 9.’
School contact person
 We need to build that relationship before it’s at the point of
stress.’
Better Pathways worker
START assessment
Format—electronic or paper?

‘We’d be keen to have online START instead of paper-based—
the reluctant ones would be more likely to have a go.’
School contact person


‘Having it in electronic format would mean lots of potential
problems and could put up more barriers. Can you get all the
kids into a computer room to access it?’
School contact person
‘It’s probably too easy on a computer to just go through the
motions.’
Regional Support Services Manager
START assessment
Format—more user friendly?


Some teachers have not understood the questions properly,
eg ‘suspicion of child abuse’
Some kids with special needs find the questions too long
winded
School contact people
START assessment
Reduce teacher admin time
Strategies

‘We get an SSO to label all the tests with EDIDs. TRTs and BP
workers administer the tests in small groups, managed by
school counsellors.’
School AP
START assessment
Involving teachers who know kids
 We want teachers who really know the students—with so many
subject lines, not many teachers really know them.’
School BP contact person
 The better the teachers know the kids, the better we can allocate
a BP worker.’
Better Pathways coordinator
START assessment:
Involving teachers who know kids
Strategies
 ‘We set up a day for home group teachers – it takes pretty much a
day to do a class. I pick home group teachers who also teach their
class for 4 lessons a week.
Those teachers have a day off-timetable and we get 5 relief
teachers in to cover for them. With the AP, the year level manager
and some SSOs, we make up a team of people who know the
students across the year level.’
School AP
START assessment
Issues:
1.
Timing of assessment
2. Format of tool
3.
Increasing efficiency
4. Greater accuracy
Elaborations:
When do you do your
assessments? Would there
be a better time?
2. Your views on the format?
3. How do you increase
efficiency in your school?
4. How do you ensure that the
teachers responding to the
START tool know the kids?
1.
Interagency panel
Issues:
 Time delay
 Between the START
 Accurate information
assessment and the
interagency panel could be at
least six months.
 Better Pathways needs
accurate information as this
forms the basis of the initial
engagement
Interagency panel
Time delay
 ‘This year we assessed in term 2 and we’ve only just started the
engagement process (in Term 4)’
School contact person
Could we have more frequent panel meetings?
 ‘You just have to be really careful with people’s time – it’s not as
simple as saying we’ll put on another meeting, because we all
have another job.’
Regional Support Services Manager
Interagency panel
Accurate information
 ‘Preparation for the panel, by someone who knows the
students is essential, because the conversation about
individual students informs the selection for the right BP
worker.’
BP manager
Gaining parent consent
Challenge:
Lack of parent consent can delay engaging the student
 ‘There’s a lot of suspicion around “welfare” because people
have had negative experiences. Some parents are afraid of
being “reported on” and that too much will be divulged. That’s
really frightening for some parents – to let someone get too
close.’
School contact person
Gaining parent consent
 ‘Last year we had a number of students who had had exclusions
and parents refused to engage with the program for reasons we
don’t know about. This is another reason for doing it earlier – if
you have a student who’s got to the end of year 9 and had an
exclusion, the parents often blame the school.’
School AP
Gaining parent consent
 Some families who’ve experienced inter-generational
unemployment don’t see education as important in life. We had
a kid who was going to leave school because their parents
convinced them they’d be better off at home on the dole.’
 Parents ‘get it’ because they see there’s some help for their child
with their education, especially in year 9. They’re not thinking so
much about transition, but keeping them engaged.’
Gaining parent consent
 A few parents have said they can’t see how it will help them or
their child. They say the school is doing a great job, Disabilities
Services are there—I know where my child is heading. And my
child can’t talk, doesn’t relate to people, is fearful, is anxious and
I don’t want my child just going off with a case worker to spend a
couple of hours a week–it’s not going to work for me and my
child.
School contact person
Gaining parent consent
Strategies:
 It’s really important to stress that the focus is on transition and
engagement – parents want their child to stay at school and
achieve.
 ‘We send out letters to parents, have information nights and do
lots of home visits. In my team, we’re doing home visits every day
to families – it’s a big part of our school to be out in the
community.’
School AP
 ‘We tell parents that it’s a program supported by the school to
help their child succeed.’
School AP
Gaining parent consent
Strategies:
 ‘We go out with the school counsellor or key worker. They
introduce us and we say what the program is about so they can
make a decision.’
BP worker
 ‘Once we know who’s been recommended and we’re looking for
appointments, the SSO will phone them and follow up with a
letter and a brochure, and then call them a couple of days
beforehand as a reminder.’
School contact person
Gaining parent consent
Strategies:
 ‘Some parents have blocked the school number so we can’t ring
them because we know they’re not going to pick up the phone.
If we can’t get hold of them, we can now pass on the number to
BP and they can follow it up.’
School AP
Gaining parent consent
Strategies:
 ‘It’s softly, softly and reinforcing that this is a partnership and
we’re going to work together. It’s about being really transparent
and trying to draw the family members into that relationship
and giving them the sense of it being collaborative.’
Better Pathways
Engaging students and families
Building trust: continuity
Issue:
Sometimes it takes a long time to build trust
Strategies:
 Continuity: in our community, people come and go a lot and
people get sick of that—sometimes they think ‘here’s another
one’. It’s good that BP has a fairly stable set of mentors.’
School AP
 It’s about making sure the student knows that you’re there and
this behaviour that’s led to everyone else giving up isn’t going
to put you off.’
Better Pathways worker
Engaging students and families
Trust: Constant and consistent
Strategies:
 For example, every Tuesday at 2pm you make contact. It might
be a phone call—regardless of whether you speak to them, they
get to know your number. Or it might be a text. And if you go to
the home, don’t just leave if they’re out – leave a calling card or
something. Then they’ll always know that on Tuesdays at 2pm
there will be some contact. And it’s worked because they know
that this person is not going to go away. It’s constant and
consistent.’
Better Pathways worker
Engaging students and families
Trust: Constant and consistent
Strategies:
 ‘One girl just wouldn’t respond, so we wrote her a letter and
decorated the envelope and that got her engaged.’
 ‘…And just keep talking even if they don’t respond. Look at the
body language and eventually you’ll find a topic that they’ll enjoy
and you can explore it with all sorts of options.’
Better Pathways worker
Educational support
Purpose of Better Pathways project
‘…early assessment of the young person’s capacity to learn, so
that an individual plan can be developed that will lead
them down realistic post-school pathways.’
Social Inclusion Board (2009)Choices and connections, p.37
Educational support
Collaboration
Issue:
Essential elements:
 Increased understandings
 Good communications
between school and mentors
supports young people
educationally and in
transition
between BP workers, teachers
and key people
 The student knows that BP
worker will advocate for them
Educational support
The SACE
Issue:
For many young people, getting their SACE will be the
passport to what they want to do
 ‘For many of the kids in this program, it’s a real challenge for
them to complete their PLP to a satisfactory standard.’
 For the ‘capabilities’, even attending BP could count towards it—
3 hours a fortnight is a big commitment, turning up at meetings.
Educational support
Getting the SACE
 School is responsible for education, but BP can provide
support, such as building confidence.
 ‘Whilst it’s not the BP worker’s job to get the PLP, it is their job
to support engagement and engaging them in something like
the PLP can be a great opportunity for a student to get some
achievement.’
 ‘It’s really important that we keep separate from school and
teachers…that we’re someone different.’
Better Pathways worker
Educational support
Supporting the PLP
 Having an understanding of the PLP (and research report)
requirements would better support students
Better Pathways workers
 ‘It would be good if we knew what was in their plans so we can
be in line with it in relation to engagement, attendance and
transition planning, even if it’s not yet at that point.’
Better Pathways worker
Educational support
Supporting the PLP
Strategies:
 The area we need to work on is the Personal Development. All
the work done with Better Pathways could be counted – we just
need a process so we sign off on it. If BP have got their plans,
they can indicate what they’ve been working on, how many
hours and so on. In a mentoring situation…that’s personal
development!
School contact person
Educational support
Supporting the PLP
Strategies:
‘I did a mock interview with a student because they were nervous
about going for a job. Later we found out it could contribute to
or be a good practice for the PLP’
Better Pathways worker
Educational support
Supporting the research project
Strategies:
 ‘They have to choose a research question, which is hard for
them – it’s very middle class – and then they need contacts to
interview. It could be as practical as “What do I need to do to
become a carpenter?” That fits perfectly and Better Pathways
could support that.’
School contact person
Educational support
Supporting the research project
Strategies:
 ‘There could be a folder into which the BP worker and student
could collect any documents/photos etc as evidence to go
towards the PLP, career planning, research report if they
happened to be doing any relevant activities.’
School contact person
Educational support
Supporting SACE achievement
Strategy:
 ‘Better Pathways workers could come to a staff meeting around
SACE or Australian Curriculum general capabilities. And if we
have someone from SACE, they could come and have a look at
portfolios when they’re being moderated.’
School contact person
Liaising and informing
Wrap around partnerships
Issue: How does support work for students who are
both FLO and Better Pathways?
 ‘How do we make sure that everybody sits around the table? In theory it works, but in
practice it doesn’t work all the time. We have to build it carefully into the system.
I worry sometimes that there are so many people involved and the time it takes to get
them all together – it has to be wrap around.’
Regional support services manager
Liaising and informing
Wrap around partnerships
Strategies:
 ‘For students that are on FLO, the BP workers have built a
relationship with the case managers to see what they can assist
them with. So they’ve worked on a particular aspect, but kept
the lines of communication open.’ BP
Transitions: post school options
Purpose of Better Pathways project
‘…early assessment of the young person’s capacity to learn, so
that an individual plan can be developed that will lead
them down realistic post-school pathways.’
Social Inclusion Board (2009)Choices and connections, p.37
Transitions: post school options
Issues:
 Early days – no student has transitioned yet with Better
Pathways support
 Better Pathways workers are focusing to keep students
engaged with school
Transitions: post school options
Multiple and complex disabilities
Issues:
 For kids with multiple and complex disabilities, many
are highly engaged with school.
 Challenges of transitioning, particularly for high end
disabilities
Transitions: post school options
Multiple and complex disabilities
 They have desire when they’re at school. But if they’re not
supported after school…18 months later, it’s a different kid.
 Transition is a dicey area.
 If they cannot engage in the year after they’ve left school, then
their chances of re-engaging are really, really low.’
Transitions: post school options
Multiple and complex disabilities
Challenges:
 Lack of transition options
 Getting sufficient funding to provide required individual





support
Finding the right service
Eligibility for support
Lack of information
Navigating territory
Poor communications
Transitions: post school options
 Whilst transition, and specifically what Better
Pathways can offer, was not discussed in interviews in
mainstream schools, it was the centre of conversations
in schools working with complex disabilities.
 The following comments, whilst made at schools
working with complex disabilities, may apply to all
Better Pathways students to varying degrees.
Better Pathways
Transition support
Better Pathways:
 is a fantastic adjunct to the bridge between school and home
 can also help with engagement out of the school—socially,
recreationally…
 can help us to find as much information as possible and act as
advocates for parents to make the best decisions for their child
 can provide monitoring when people leave to ensure supports
are genuinely there.
‘I love this idea of someone who knows them from school,
who knows the family, has the trust and can carry through.’