preparing for & managing the change to college/sixth form
Here in the SUN, one of our aims is to help young people make the right decisions about their next steps in education. An important part of the programme is about helping young people to have a positive experience of moving from school (or from school leaving age of 16) into college or sixth form. For young people who are care-experienced, there can be (not always) additional factors that make this change hard. We wanted to understand what this looks like in real life in the hope of helping to improve this experience for future young people. So, we formed a consultation group with people who work closely with care-experienced students and co-produced a survey to help us find out more. This is a pilot project that we hope can be developed further in the future.
Who’s in the consultation group?
portsmouth virtual school & foster carer
The Consultation Group also includes members of staff from The Portsmouth Virtual School (Portsmouth City Council) and a Foster Carer from the local area.
who else has helped?
University of portsmouth, eric
Sophie Hall, Research Fellow in the Education Research, Innovation and Consultancy (ERIC) Unit, University of Portsmouth. Sophie is providing the Consultation Group advice throughout the project which we are incredibly grateful for!
become
Staff from the charity Become, including some of their Young Trainers, took part in focus groups to review the draft survey. Become’s Young Trainers are care-experienced and gave expert suggestions about things ranging from the topics we’re focusing on in the survey to the language we’re using. They even advised us on how to share the survey with care-experienced young people. In fact, it was their idea for us to create this webpage so that students who take part in the survey can see the results of the project!
SUN’s Evaluation and Impact Officer
Matt Hockings, the SUN’s Evaluation and Impact Officer helped us turn our survey digital! He converted our questions from a MS Word Document into the Jisc Online Survey version.
what’s happening right now?
Young people who work with the Portsmouth Virtual School, and who are in Year 12 (or equivalent) and studying at college or sixth form are currently completing the survey. It will close on Friday 16 June.
what happens next?
Once the survey has closed, the following will happen:
- The SUN will check through all the survey responses to make sure there’s no personal or identifiable information included (both about any of the students who have completed the survey and anyone else)
- In July, the Consultation Group will get together again to analyse the results
- We’ll then think about what the next steps should be but we won’t know what these are until we’ve received the survey responses
- We’ll keep this page updated regularly so that anyone who has completed the survey, or who is interested in the results can keep up-to-date!
want to know more?
If you’re a young person who works with the Portsmouth Virtual School and have questions about this project or want to know more, you’re very welcome to speak to your Education Caseworker (Advocate). Alternatively you can email sun@soton.ac.uk.
For anyone else, email sun@soton.ac.uk to find out more.
