Work to reduce school exclusions in Borough of Scarborough
It's part of the North Yorkshire Coast Opportunity Area
Work is on-going in the Borough of Scarborough to try and reduce the number of school suspensions and exclusions.
It is part of the North Yorkshire Coast Opportunity Area which is aimed at supporting ambition and social mobility.
It is being funded by the Department for Education until August 2022.
It is trying to understand the causes of exclusions, particularly in secondary years, and how they can work with schools, the students themselves and their families to prevent it.
Richard Benstead, Programme Director, said:
"This was looking at making sure that children and young people spend as much time as they possibly can in school, in classrooms, and therefore reducing the amount of time that they're not in school so be that due to attendance issues or because they're being excluded for one behavioural reason or another.
"Some of those reasons were perhaps the young person didn't have the prior learning to fully engage in the lesson so therefore they were choosing to disengage, or they felt they had to disengage because they didn't understand the content. Some of them may be because they had complex issues going on at home.
"Schools could have additional things to support the children and young people to take part in a lesson. In that area we've done a lot of work around mentoring and around working with behaviour policies they may have because we all want those children and young people to spend as much as time as they can in school and to have the best possible experience.
"We're going to do more of the mentoring at secondary schools. We particularly are focussing on when children move on from primary to secondary school because we know that can be a very disruptive time and it can be a shock to the system from being in a relatively small primary to being in this overwhelming huge secondary school.
"We know that by the time you leave primary that foundation of learning that you've acquired in primary and your experience are so vital and really follow you throughout your education, so we want to make sure that if there are children who may be likely to be excluded at primary that we're identifying them early and getting them the right support."