How would you deal with this trend in data?

[StuffezLaYoni]

We are a small junior school in a nice village on the outskirts of a difficult town. Most of the children come from the village, but a significant minority come from the town.

The Assessment Coordinator and I have been analysing data this week and we have both noticed that children under-performing are overwhelmingly from single parent families. Obviously, we weren't looking for this as a factor - it just became glaringly obvious during the course of the meeting.

I know that as we are small, this may not "mean" anything (3 of my FSM pupils look likely to get sixes in their SATs, for example)
But is there anything I can do to tackle this? Single parent families aren't exactly a vulnerable group. Is this a trend in data or is it just circumstance?

What about using some PP money to provide a 'homework club' at breakfast time and specifically targeting single parent families?
Or, provide some sessions at appropriate times (with childcare) for single parents to support them in supporting their children with English & Maths

Those are brilliant ideas, thanks HHG. Feedback from parents has so for indicated they would like some guidance with the SPaG content, so that might be an ideal place to start.

Can you tell this is a long-running theme in my school!

Have you checked that there aren't other factors which could explain it? For instance, do all the children live in the difficult town, and the single-parent connection is simply a red herring?

You collect single family data?

Anecdotally it is rare for children in my school to live with both parents, extremely rare but we don't collect or analyse that as a data point

Where would you input it?

No, we don't collect single family data at all. But the village and the school are tiny, so between us we really do know the family circumstances of the vast majority of the pupils. As I said, we weren't looking for that - but it did become apparent. We are an Outstanding (whatever that means these days) school, so the few who don't make good progress are in the minority, and we were simply trying to ascertain what might be holding them back.

lougle I thought that, too but it's not necessarily the case. However, I do think that in the end it will just come down to each individual child's circumstances. I did like HedgeHog's idea of the working with parents. The school doesn't do much of this at the mo, so I might suggest it.