Wellbeing: How well do you know your children - individually?
Do you know the socio-emotional needs of your students?
How do we know whether we are meeting the social and emotional needs of our students?
How do you know and measure students' well-being?
Warning: The page signposts the work of a specific company that supports schools. Whilst many schools use their services I present it as only one example. In no way does this website specifically endorse any one service provider.
How can we track students' pastoral care so we meet their needs?
“Increasingly schools want to act proactively to prevent pastoral car crashes rather than respond once they occur. AS tracking is a breakthrough adolescent development tool that helps schools act earlier through a pioneering system to detect a pupil's hidden risks.” (AS Tracking website)
AS Tracking is a proactive tool that detects risks earlier by measuring pupils' steering cognition biases. It is all about helping schools become evidence-based about their pastoral care. Underpinning it is a pragmatic acceptance that unless we are able to measure something in hard data, we do not pay attention to it. In order to truly value the development of a child’s social-emotional characteristics and flourishing, we have to have some reliable, calibrated means of measurement.
'AS Tracking' is an online pupil-voice assessment to guide proactive, targeted, evidence based in-school pastoral care.
It is:
- A monitoring tool for all students since it measures how pupils are developing over time. It is a tracking tool (telling us where a child is on their journey) and not a profiling tool (telling us who a child is). All students in the school will be monitored but only a proportion will be highlighted as having vulnerabilities. Of those who are flagged some will be known to you but others will not. They flag around 10% but it depends on the actual school. The next time you track the students the identified students may be different because the road of adolescence is not smooth.
- A tool that is aimed to identify the ‘hidden vulnerable’ allowing schools to act earlier. Vulnerable children are those who are developing unhealthy, limiting patters of thinking and behaviour. These patterns of thinking may indicate undiagnosed hidden neuro developmental conditions or issues surrounding the environment (e.g. bullying). It does this by identifying potential cognitive biases which can develop into entrenched cycles of thinking (e.g. children who are unable to self-disclose).
- A tool deigned to equip teachers to be able to put in place in-school targeted action plans which will allow students to steer their lives better. It provides tutors agency to support their students because it provides them with psychologically researched actions that they can use to support their student.
AS TRACKING is based on a psychology of the self as an open and emerging person in relation to others. This tool helps each student tell and curate their own story.
STEER: AS Tracking is a map of how you steer your life through adolescence. Here is a video that AS Tracking use to introduce their tool to students.
Key features
Enables schools to be proactive, targeted and evidence-based in their pastoral care.
Detect risks by measuring pupils' cognitive steering biases
Supports the writing of year/house development plans to ensure each stage of the school is as pastorally effective.
Focus resources directly and strategically on those pupils who most need support.
Target priority students: put in place effective, targeted individual action plans without considerable additional provision of time or cost.
Curate a unique 10 year record of a child’s social-emotional development, showing their pathway across adolescence.
Develop staff pastoral skills using precise, real-time pastoral guidance to provide effective pastoral tutoring across your school.
Analyse whole-school trends
WHAT curriculum support is given?
Whilst AS Tracking is a tracking tool to help identiy student well-being issues it also supports students in developing their own agency so that they can steer their own life. It does this in three explicit ways:
- Footprints is a curriculum for 8-11 year olds: a series of 12 lessons that introduce students to the key concepts behind steering their own life. Footprints is so named because it helps students consider the footprints they are lwaving on other people and the space that they are inhabiting.
- CAS tracking is a curriculum programme for 11-18 year olds introducing them to developing metacognitive skills so that they can better access learning in the classroom. It provides students with a lexicon to teach metacognition.
- USTEER is a new app that is being developed that enables students to understand their own patterns of behaviour and help steer their relationships throughout life.
Ideas from schools:
- GO TWOS: At the beginning of the year ask eac h student to identify two adults in school who they would go to in need. These are their 'go to' people. When you think a student is struggling you then know who they would like you to help them.
- WHISPER: Anonymised reporting. Our safeguarding duties no longer stop at the school gates. The boundaries between in-school and out-of-school incidents are now blurred, as social media and technology give students 24/7 access to each other. Problems may be more pervasive now, but screenshots and chat logs have made them easier to evidence. Do your students have a safe way to disclose their issues in confidence? What about staff or parents that have concerns?
- Specialist staff: Cognitive behaviour specialist on staff.
- Provide safeguarding training to student leaders.
- Staff wellbeing day: using a professional development day and provide a selection of activities for staff to choose from.
- 1:1 Check-Ins: Senior leadership team meets individually with all members of staff in which staff can talk about anything they are concerned about. Ensure member of staff does not get their line manager.