Summary - this section describes how an Education Improvement Partnership (EIP) can improve behaviour and attendance as one of several potential functions, which also include raising attaiment; childcare and extended services; and workforce reform.   

Sharing good practice on encouraging better attendance, early intervention with pupil behaviour to prevent exclusions, enabling schools to manage excluded pupils outside the classroom, and ensuring that excluded pupils get a full time education are key elements in the Behaviour and Attendance Strategy. 

In practice, this means effective support for teachers in the classroom, quality on-site provision in Learning Support Units, schools able to exclude where they need to, quality off-site alternative provision and sound arrangements to get excluded pupils back in class when it is appropriate for them to return. A collaborative approach where schools work together, supported by local authorities, to manage challenging pupils and to take responsibility for provision and funding, will be the best way to ensure a range of support for schools, and of provision for learners.  

Education Improvement Partnerships provide an opportunity for schools to develop a multi-agency approach, involving schools, local authorities, Educational Welfare Services, and social services. Wider children’s services working in partnership with schools will allow early intervention to identify and help those whose behaviour is a sign of more complex needs and problems, and to provide a range of support to children in order to foster the good behaviour that is essential to learning and good citizenship.  

Working together, schools in EIPs will be able to share expertise and facilities such as Learning Support Units and be more closely involved in managing Pupil Referral Units. With funding for behaviour support and alternative provision for pupils in mainstream schools increasingly devolved to – and controlled by – Education Improvement Partnerships rather than by local authorities, EIPs will be able to act as commissioners for preventative alternative provision. Pooling resources, a partnership will be able to buy in provision from local authorities or from the voluntary sector, and to pay for extra support tailored specifically to their needs in order both to get the support they need, and to make a wider range of quality provision available to pupils. 

A partnership could buy in additional support in the form of, for example, Learning Mentors, family liaison workers, counsellors, behaviour teacher hours, the time of police and social workers or of professionals who could provide specialist advice on dealing with children whose challenging behaviour is linked to special educational needs. Once they had 'purchased' this time, it would then be up to the partnership to decide how best to utilise it in order to meet the needs of all the member schools.

Alternative provision could be provided in a Pupil Referral Unit where headteachers from across the group of schools are members of the management board. Equally, alternative provision programmes could be offered by schools in partnership with a range of private, voluntary and community sector organisations such as FE colleges, the Prince's Trust and Skill Force. Schools could also agree to move pupils with lower level behaviour difficulties between schools within the partnership, when this is appropriate, through supported managed moves. Education Improvement Partnerships will also support the development of local protocols around re-integrating excluded pupils into schools on an equitable basis. All secondary schools should have a protocol for admitting most "hard to place" pupils by September 2005 and these should be extended where necessary to include previously excluded pupils, for whom reintegration to school is appropriate, by September 2007.

Over 50 local authorities are already committed to working in partnership on behaviour and attendance, and every secondary school should be part of a partnership working together to manage behaviour provision by September 2007.

Publication Date: May 2005 

Last Updated: July 2006