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4 Children in School
4.1 For some of these vulnerable children, attendance at school provides a respite from difficult home circumstances. For others, the consequences of family substance misuse include poor attendance, lack of progress with their education and failure to develop the necessary social and behavioural skills. This can be particularly difficult for children if they are also taking on a carer role for parents or siblings.
Children can "act out", through challenging behaviour, or "act in", through withdrawal or self-harming behaviours, the distress that they are experiencing due to difficulties at home.
It is important that teachers and other staff in both primary and secondary schools know about the home environment of children in these circumstances so that they can respond appropriately. This is not always easy, but there is good practice that can be more widely disseminated and built upon.
The Education (Additional Support for Learning)(Scotland) Act 2004 places new duties on local authorities towards individual children and young people with additional support needs, with the aim of creating a stronger, better system for supporting their learning.
The proposals in "Getting it Right for Every Child" envisage a unified and child-centred approach to all services for all children built around a single, integrated assessment of a child's needs. Where multi-agency input is required, an action plan will be developed, with a lead professional appointed to ensure that agreed actions are delivered and that progress is monitored. It is intended that new duties will be placed on all agencies to be alert to the needs of children, to identify children in need and to co-operate to develop plans for individual children and to monitor progress and outcomes.
The agendas set out in "Getting it Right for Every Child" and "Hidden Harm" will also help to inform the Executive's work to improve the support available to young carers.
Key issues in relation to children and teenagers in school Best practice means: - providing training and awareness amongst teachers and other school staff so that they can identify children with substance misuse problems or living in such families;
- providing opportunities for children to engage in positive relationships with adults in and out of the school environment, in order for them to cope with family circumstances;
- ensuring that practitioners who have direct relationships with children know how and where to raise their concerns about children and how to get more specialised support;
- providing positive learning experience and good relationships with adults in school so that children can develop resilience and coping mechanisms; and
- ensuring that there is clear guidance for all staff in both statutory and voluntary sectors about referral routes and relevant sources of help for children.
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4.2 Key Action Points
The Executive will undertake the following action to promote best practice in relation to children and teenagers in school. We will:
- make sure that all health promotion departments have arrangements in place to provide support to their local education authorities for the staff member leading pastoral care in each school - by summer 2006;
- support two demonstration projects examining how to develop children's social,
emotional and behavioural skills, where these may have been damaged by difficult home experiences, through different approaches to Nurture Groups. Nurture Group approaches will be evaluated for their potential to help children maintain their involvement in education - between 2006-2008; - publish a framework for continuing professional development during the early years of a teacher's career - during 2006;
- publish and distribute to schools and education authorities "good practice" guidance on how to build positive relationships with hard-to-reach families, based on education practitioners' experiences - during 2006;
- through HMIE, assess the impact of the Additional Support for Learning Act and report to Ministers, after which a view will be taken as to any necessary developments to the Act and the Code - 2007; and
- facilitate the participation of school and other education staff in national dissemination activities and networking aimed at supporting vulnerable children in school - by 2008.
4.3 Further action required
As part of the continuing implementation of "Hidden Harm - Next Steps", the Executive and local agencies will undertake the following:
- promoting services that provide accessible and timely support for vulnerable children and young people, including facilities so that they can access direct help for themselves. Possible services might include telephone help lines, text servicing and interactive websites;
- improving the contact and communications between vulnerable families and school authorities so that issues around vulnerable children can be discussed in trust; and
- make sure that there is consistency of support and information sharing in the key transitional years between primary and secondary schooling.
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