Welcome
Our focus is improving the life chances of children who are
in the care of the Local Authority by raising their educational
achievement. Our information and guidance is for
professionals who also share this aim and is organised into four
main areas:
Northumberland's Virtual School
The Virtual School is a strategic tool to enable the effective
co-ordination of services to champion the educational needs of
children in care.
We have no school building but we do share some
features of a ‘real’ school to enable us to identify and then
meet the needs of individuals.
The pupils of the Virtual School are enrolled at “real”
schools and remain the responsibility of the school at which they
are enrolled.
We have:
- A virtual school
workforce which includes a Headteacher (Jane
Walker), the well-established Education Support for Looked After
Children (ESLAC) team and the Designated Teachers for Looked After
Children in all of our schools and academies;
- A MALAP (multi-agency looked after partnership) which acts as
our Governing
Body and critical friend, to drive our improvement
as a school and promote high standards of educational
achievement;
- An assessment
database which tracks and monitors the progress and
attainment of all looked after children in Northumberland schools
and our children in schools or academies outside of our
Authority;
- A complementary provision management
database which records all of the additional and
special needs of individual children and interventions or resources
which are being used to ensure that those needs are met;
- A Virtual School Improvement Plan
which sets out our priorities for our second year (2012-2013)
and which builds on the school Implementation Plan 2011-2012.
