Project Brodie
Keeping vulnerable youngsters at school
Failing to attend school has a major impact on young people’s education and life chances, making it more likely they will be unemployed after leaving school and increasing the likelihood of being drawn into crime and anti-social behaviour.
Project Brodie is a joint partnership between the GLA and London Councils that aims to increase attendance by focusing on three interlinked themes. Firstly, reducing bullying and the violent behaviour of some pupils who make others feel unsafe to go to school. Secondly, reducing absences through early intervention and supporting families. Thirdly, enforcing attendance where preventative measures fail: a joint role for Local Authorities and the Metropolitan Police Service.
There is a vast range of work focused on increasing attendance already taking place in this area at a national, regional and local level. Therefore Brodie is targeted at the gaps and how, as a strategic partnership, it can bring alignment to various disparate workstreams. The current work programme includes:
· Safer and Supportive Environments
o Strengthening Safer Schools Partnerships
o Supporting the extension of anti-bullying and tackling violence in schools and FE colleges
· Preventing Absence
o Profiling persistent absentees
o Specialist intensive support for vulnerable 8-12 year olds and their parents
o Delivering interventions aimed at increasing attendance in Pupil Referral Units (Short Stay Schools)
· Enforcing Attendance
o Improving the consistence and use of enforcement in schools (truancy patrols, fixed penalty notices and prosecutions)
o Increasing the use of technology to alert parents/carers of non-attendanceFailing to attend school has a major impact on young people’s education and life chances, making it more likely they will be unemployed after leaving school and increasing the likelihood of being drawn into crime and anti-social behaviour.
In London there are close to two million days per year lost to unauthorised absence and approximately 18,000 persistent absentees (those missing at least 38 days of school per year).
A joint approach
Project Brodie is a joint partnership between the GLA and London Councils that aims to increase attendance by focusing on three interlinked themes. Firstly, reducing bullying and the violent behaviour of some pupils who make others feel unsafe to go to school. Secondly, reducing absences through early intervention and supporting families. Thirdly, enforcing attendance where preventative measures fail: a joint role for local authorities and the Metropolitan Police Service.
There is a vast range of work focused on increasing attendance already taking place in this area at a national, regional and local level. Therefore Brodie is targeted at the gaps and how, as a strategic partnership, it can bring alignment to various disparate workstreams.
The current work programme includes:
Safer and Supportive Environments
- Strengthening Safer Schools Partnerships
- Supporting the extension of anti-bullying and tackling violence in schools and FE colleges.
Preventing Absence
- Profiling persistent absentees
- Specialist intensive support for vulnerable 8-12 year olds and their parents
- Delivering interventions aimed at increasing attendance in Pupil Referral Units (Short Stay Schools).
- Improving the consistence and use of enforcement in schools (truancy patrols, fixed penalty notices and prosecutions)
- Increasing the use of technology to alert parents/carers of non-attendance.
Why Brodie? The name is taken from the central character, a teacher in 1930s Edinburgh, in the novel “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” written by Muriel Spark in 1961.
