How one Trust is identifying ‘under the radar’ pupils in primary to support them through transition

We had previously developed a tool which we call our ‘Windscreen’ as a way of identifying potential barriers to learning. It has helped us bring a common language and approach to supporting our more vulnerable young people and families. Wrapping support around them improves their chances, but only if you know that they need it and are specific about the type of support that will have an impact.

For each child, we look at criteria including welfare, SEND, behaviour, attendance, and safeguarding. Then under each of these headings we map specific elements, so for example under welfare we might look at physical health and parenting. We use levels to indicate where and how seriously barriers might impact on learning.

Each of the 2,500 children across the Trust is mapped against the Windscreen and its levels. It means that we know at a glance which children are most vulnerable – for example they might be in the social care arena, or may have been permanently excluded from another school. It’s a robust system which has helped us to be more proactive in helping more children.

But there are still a small group of children who could go under the radar at primary school. Mapping them against the Windscreen does not necessarily identify them as vulnerable – but that’s where PASS comes in. As we were already working with SHINE and Right to Succeed, we were able to explore through them what options were out there, and what other schools were doing and that led us to PASS.

We have four levels of need on the Windscreen, and are now feeding PASS insights into these. Under Behaviour, for example, Level 2 might include patterns of inconsistent engagement in the classroom, sustained lack of progress, and a PASS indicator of below average. All of this together provides a more robust, holistic picture of our learners.

If there’s been social care involvement, or a child is persistently absent, has been excluded, or has an EHCP, then they are automatically level 4 on our Windscreen, almost regardless of their PASS profile.

We have an online tracker based on our SPOC meetings (Single Point of Contact). Every week we look at the children moving up and down the Windscreen – for example from level 2 to level 3, and ask: why is this happening, what can we do?

Our Windscreen was a really valuable measure for the Trust, so we wanted PASS to contribute extra insights which we may otherwise have missed – like jigsaw pieces that we didn’t know we needed.

In 2019 we set up a three year project to assess all young people in years 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, using PASS assessment.

We started with the critical year group in terms of transition, Year 6, looking for children whose PASS scores were much lower than their peers. We compared this data to their profiles on our Windscreen, and watched for those ‘under the radar’ pupils who we knew would struggle with transition without support.

For pupils in Years 4 and 5, the PASS profiles were used to help shape our curriculum offer, especially in supporting personal development to help counter low self-regard as a learner. Building their confidence at this stage should help them in Year 6 and pave the way to success at transition.

We then planned to re-test students when they reached Years 7 and 8 and hopefully see improvements, but these profiles would also feed into our curriculum enhancements.

PASS identified a group of 13 ‘under the radar’ children that hadn’t been picked up on our Windscreen as vulnerable at transition. That’s where our new Vulnerable Learner Lead Practitioner role came in, providing bespoke support. It was always our vision for this role to be the bridge between school and community. Often these children were the ones not accessing community services such as youth clubs which could support their personal development and sustain them both outside and beyond school.

With the role in place, the schools definitely felt the benefit, and all 13 children who started secondary in that second year transitioned successfully. All of them are still there, they’re now just finishing Year 8 and generally doing well. We’re realistic, some of them had complex issues and could be challenging, but we felt confident that we understood their needs and had given them their best chance.

We started our project just before Covid, which massively impacted our first year. But in our second year, PASS profiles were really helpful at giving school leaders an overview of cohort strengths, and the format of the reports made it really easy to read through – schools really liked that. All the shared vocabulary around PASS proved helpful for us all too.

But despite this success, we still hadn’t successfully got the role making the link with the community which we felt it should. In the second year, we employed a Youth Worker better able to do this. He’s working with around 34 young people and around half of them are already accessing community groups. Eleven transitioned into secondary last year, and all are still there and doing well. We’re really encouraged by their attendance levels – in Year 7 this is around 90% which compares favourably with the national average.

We have a data dashboard where we put PASS scores alongside those on our Windscreen to give us a comprehensive overview. All the data is shared with our schools.

Child A was in Year 6 at one of our primary schools. When he took PASS, his self-regard as a learner was 2.2, and response to curriculum demands was 0.8. He had low scores across the board but these two stood out. We felt that he could potentially do well but he just wasn’t engaging in learning, he also had some SEND, and was pupil premium. The Youth Worker put bespoke support in place for him including daily check-ins, goal setting, a visual timetable, and a selection of the activities provided with PASS. He’s now engaged externally with a youth centre, which should help make his progress sustainable. Hopefully he’ll engage with youth work in the community which will then wrap around him a bit more and continue to build his confidence.

Child A is now at the end of Year 7 and his attendance rate is – wait for it – 97%. We don’t yet have new PASS results for him yet, but we know from all the feedback from the school that he’s doing really well.

These extracts from Child B’s PASS reports in June 2023 and February 2024 clearly show the extent of the need, and the impact just a few months later of targeted support put in place by the Youth Worker. Child B is now much better equipped to handle the challenges of transition in September 2024, and we wish him every success.

We were more skilled at using PASS, which enabled us to more accurately identify pupils needing support. Thanks to our Youth Worker, we also had stronger links with community groups providing support outside school, so the information we passed on to our secondary schools was stronger.

We’re conscious that the Youth Worker has been excellent at building community links and developing social justice projects, but a lack of school experience has meant that the in-school PASS specific work has been less impactful. Does one person who can do both exist, or is it just too big a role? There are different skills involved in delivering one-to-one and small group sessions in school, and forging links in the community. Next year we’re linking in to the Newcastle United Foundation, who already do some work with our schools, and should add to our capacity.

1. You’ve got to put the time in at the start to train staff and get them using the reports. In the first year, we didn’t make the most of what PASS was telling us. There’s a lot of free support provided by GL, including one to one consultations to discuss what your reports are telling you, and I’d definitely recommend taking advantage of this.
2. To really make a difference to a child with learning barriers, you need to spot them and act on them early. PASS is really powerful for that, flagging up children in need of support well before the signs are obvious.
3. In hindsight I’d probably have implemented PASS in a staggered approach – doing Year 5 well, identifying curriculum changes, then measuring the impact before moving on. Instead we went all out, looking at Years 4 to 8. We learned a lot, but perhaps at the expense of strategic focus.
4. Have a clear strategic oversight of your project and its goals: this is what we want to achieve, these are our goals, this is how we’re going to act on the findings. Know what you want from intervention support, and be specific about the form this will take. 
5. For us, a core goal was achieving sustainable change, not ‘just’ improvements while a child is at school, but wider personal development that equips them in the community once they leave. (I’ve got a real thing about sustainability.)
6. Because we had secured funding to enable us to focus on bespoke support and building community links, we haven’t yet used the PASS interventions much. But they’re really quick and easy to use and we expect to draw on them more next year. 

Every single child identified by PASS and subsequently supported has benefitted. Classroom teachers consistently report improvements in confidence, engagement, and interpersonal skills. Once we know which children are vulnerable, we can target one to one support where it’s needed. Often just giving them a little space and time is enough to change their outcomes. That’s why PASS is so powerful.

1. Enhance our understanding of our students’ needs by adding PASS into our existing Windscreen measure for more holistic and robust insights into each child.
2. Identify primary pupils who are flying ‘under the radar’ early enough to give them support before transition to secondary.
3. Encourage students to get involved with community groups to help foster life skills and confidence outside and beyond school.

PASS comes with 70 ready-to-use interventions so that you can start responding to needs immediately.

All our assessments come with free support as standard, from online tutorials to one-to-one consultations with our expert education advisers who will help you derive maximum benefit from your reports. 

SHINE is an education charity working with teachers, schools and other organisations, helping disadvantaged children in the North of England to fulfil their true potential. 

Right to Succeed is a charity working with communities in areas of high deprivation, ‘because every child deserves the right to succeed, no matter where they live.’