King Ecgbert School began this academic year with a Vulnerable Learners’ Strategy in place. Headteacher Paul Haigh describes what this looks like, what its purpose is, and how it works in practice...


King Ecgbert School in Sheffield is a proudly comprehensive large 11 to 18 secondary school at the heart of the Mercia Learning Trust.

It is comprehensive in the genuinely inclusive sense. But meeting the needs of a cohort that includes all sorts of different learners is both our proudest feature and our biggest challenge.

In September we introduced a new strategy – a Vulnerable Learners’ Strategy – to try to ensure that the needs of children who face multiple barriers to learning traditionally addressed by different staff in different areas of school could be better met by bringing everyone together into one strategic group.

King Ecgbert, pictured above, is in the leafy suburb of Dore – a countryside village on the Yorkshire-Derbyshire border swallowed up by the industrial growth of Sheffield. But do not be tricked by this well-to-do village with its backdrop of the Eastern Moors of the Peak District. This is a city school. It has a wedge-shaped catchment extending from countryside barn conversions via the suburbs to the inner-city terraces along one of Sheffield’s five rivers.

The school is multicultural with around a third of students being bilingual, the majority of whom come from Sheffield’s British-Pakistani community. The school has such an inclusive reputation that about 6% of children have Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) – 69 at the time of writing putting it the top centile nationally. The school has a long-standing reputation for its work with children on the autistic spectrum.

Add to that the challenges of city life – 1 in 5 children going home to a family in severe poverty – and consider contextual safeguarding risks from a thriving drug-dealing industry near the city centre that preys on teens as customers and couriers.

And remember, too, the challenge we all face in post-pandemic times where vulnerable learners have been most impacted.

Layer all this with a cost-of-living crisis that is set to rub salt into those very same wounds and this high-achieving school knows that to keep meeting the needs of all learners in the face of these challenges that have impacted attendance, behaviour and progress, we need to be creative.

The school takes its own self-evaluation very seriously. It constantly strives to improve and wants to be judged by its work with the most vulnerable. School leaders and governors are motivated by social mobility and helping the less fortunate students copy their more advantaged peers in achieving great things at school and going on to university or high value vocational courses.

It was through work with experts Fiona McNally, a lead Ofsted inspector, and Nick Whittaker, an ex-HMI and Ofsted’s SEND lead, that we created the Vulnerable Learners’ Strategy.


Vulnerable Learners Supplement: Free download

This article is one of many to feature in SecEd’s March 2023 vulnerable learners supplement. The free 18-page download focuses on boosting attendance for vulnerable students as well as tackling the impact of poverty and other issues. It includes practical advice from colleagues working in our schools as well as three case studies of how schools are supporting their students. Published in March 2023, you can download the supplement in pdf format here.


Intersectionality of multiple factors

The issue identified by this vital external scrutiny was that when you look at individual areas of school – be that behaviour, attendance, SEND, Pupil Premium strategy, EAL and reading plans or safeguarding work, leaders each had a clear plan and knew the learners on their case load intimately well.

However, Fiona identified that the problem was each area working in silos without reference to one another. Students don’t compartmentalise their lives into their reading struggle, their safeguarding risk, and the impact of economic disadvantage – their life is one lived experience affected by these things.

So what wasn’t being addressed was what Nick described as the “intersectionality of multiple factors”. If you take a child who does not speak English as a first language, lives in poverty and attends poorly, has SEN and a chaotic life where home is not always safe, they are going to have multiple leaders in school and likely the involvement of multiple agencies outside of school. But they did not have one single plan owned by a person with the overview to meeting all their learning needs.

For that child, no single issue might meet the threshold for intervention in the name of reading, attendance, or behaviour for example – but add them all together and they have a barrier to learning the size of a mountain; they fail to thrive and, in the end, achieve less than they could. Their life is not transformed in the way a great education can.


A whole other cohort

And so a register of vulnerable learners was created. By listing everyone who ticks a box around attendance, below expected reading age, poor behaviour, SEND status, safeguarding status, Pupil Premium flag, or EAL category and then ranking by “how many” criteria they hit we created a register with those who tick multiple boxes.

At the top were well known names of students causing concern – and they likely all had detailed Pastoral Support Plans and already had a multi-agency approach through involvement with external agencies. This strategy wasn’t aimed at them, they already had everything thrown at them.

But just below that level was a whole other cohort – not at risk of permanent exclusion, not unable to read, not persistently absent, not known to social care – but all the same facing serious cumulative challenges.

I restructured the senior team, appointing Charlotte Bowyer, an assistant head who already had a great track record overseeing Pupil Premium, EAL and reading strategy, to the newly created role of assistant headteacher for vulnerable learners.

Intentionally, the role does not sit in the half of the senior leadership team that reports to the pastoral deputy head or the half that reports to the curriculum deputy head. The role needed to be a bridge between the two.

The answers to these children’s needs would be a mixture of an appropriate curriculum and teaching strategies plus the pastoral strategies to ensure they are in the classroom and able to learn in the first place.

A strategy group meets once a week chaired by Charlotte. Taking one year group at a time means each year group gets considered at least six times a year allowing cycles of review. It is the only time the SENCO, pastoral leaders, year managers, attendance lead, safeguarding lead, and our full-time careers and aspirations leader will all share a meeting.


A regular review

Names from the register are “brought” to the meeting when it is felt that a student is not making the progress they should be, and heads are brought together to come up with a plan.

Gaps in provision are looked for, strategies not tried are suggested and any risks to the child that one part of the school thought another part was dealing with are eliminated.

Often strategies will be classroom-based with communication back to a child’s teachers about needs and strategies – perhaps calling meetings of all the teachers of a named child or perhaps with updates on the Provision Map IT system.

Not only are all teachers expected to have well-thought-out seating plans where children are seated in the place where they will be best supported but teachers are also asked to annotate their seating plans with strategies that they know work for their vulnerable learners.

At the heart of this is the simple fact that when teachers really know their learners, they can better meet their needs.

The half-termly cycle of meetings means the register gets reviewed – have children on the register seen improvements in attendance, behaviour or learning outcomes? Can they be removed from the register? Or can they be “deprioritised”?

A vital part of this strategy is the tracking of the students and reviewing where they are. Six weeks is long enough to put strategies in place and to hope to see improvement; 12 or 18 weeks should see sustained change.


Signs of success?

As I write, we are half a year in and it is too soon to say if the strategy has been a real success – that will be measured in purposeful progress to ambitious post-16 education and avoiding becoming NEET.

The more complex needs of a post-pandemic key stage 3 cohort have a bit of time before these outcomes are measured. Beyond 16, a great education, everyone knows, is about children becoming successful young adults happily in employment and living an independent life escaping the poverty trap – but as a system we never seem to try to track that.

What I can tell you is that, in the short-term, impact has been seen with improvements in attendance and behaviour data and the commencement of support from outside agencies that we hope will turn into concrete impact on progress with learning as the year unfolds.

We certainly have a much clearer overview of our vulnerable learners’ identities, needs and plans to address them.