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I hope you have all enjoyed the recent Bank Holidays, and have managed to have some time away from work!
It has been some time since our last newsletter, so we are keen to hopefully bring you up-to-date with our current position, and provide some additional information regarding ongoing activities. We would love to hear from you too, to help you promote anything that supports our NEET young people, so please get in touch!
You will see from our School Update below that work is ongoing to ensure we have firm plans for all our Year 11 & Year 12 leavers. We rely on all of our local education & training providers to supply data regarding offers made, to enable us to identify gaps and provide support. If I can ask that you work with our Data Support Team via our new Sharepoint to provide us with timely updates, it will be a huge help!
If you are a provider with Year 12 learners that are without a positive progression pathway, please let the FutureFocus Team know. You can reach us on 01952 388988, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. I am sure that working together we can ensure as many of our young people are engaged in something positive and meaningful!
I hope you are happy to continue receiving this update. We are keen to hear your preferences around frequency, so please let us know. If you wish to be removed from the distribution list or want any of your teams adding please drop me a line at tara.foran@telford.gov.uk
Best wishes
Tara Foran
Future Focus Team leader
As you are aware, Local Authorities have a statutory duty to track young people up to the end of Year 13 and support them to engage in education, training or employment with training.
The performance for this tracking is collated for all LA's by DfE and is published each month. The latest published data is for March 2023 and is detailed below.
We are showing some evidence of decreases in our 'Not Known' and 'NEET' young people compared with the same point last year, but as you can see we are working harder to find new provision for the amount of joiners that we have referred each month. In the month of March 2023 we had 23 joiners and 19 leavers. Young people are allocated a FutureFocus Careers Adviser as soon as we know they are NEET and our job is to support and encourage engagement in order to progress.
All our young people are allocated a RAG rating (Red, Amber and Green) in order to understand and rate the complexities of the young people we are working with. As expected, a significant number of our NEET yp currently have a Red rating, evidencing significant barriers to EET.
Here is our current published position for March 2023
Here are the latest NEET and Not Known details for the end of March 2023
 New Re-engagement Provision
Recently we have been working with some of our local organisations to establish some additional re-engagement provision to try and encourage those who are unable to engage with education, training or employment. The purpose of this is to support them to have a go at something that may be a bit different and is of interest to them.
Our providers that are delivering this offer are:
Shropshire Youth Support Trust
Crossbar Coaching
Landau
The Cavalier Centre
Telford MIND
These providers will be working with our most disengaged young people to encourage them to progress on to further provision when they are ready.
This provision is only for those in year 12 and 13 who are recorded as NEET. Here are a couple of examples of the kind of provision that is on offer.
 
On the 25th of April we held our SEN Information and Transition event at Southwater One in partnership with IASS. We had 23 different providers and services that were present so young people and families could gain information regarding their provision, programs and support they offer to enable the young person to make informed choices and decisions regarding their post 16 choices and options. These include local further education colleges, training providers, local university, along with support services and organisations including IASS, POD’s, PfA SEND team and social care professionals
We had 26 young people/ parents attend and received the following feedback:
Parent -"Great support from FutureFocus, needed guidance and they were so much help."
Provider feedback- “I really enjoyed meeting everyone. It was a really useful and enjoyable event for me. I am looking forward to attending the next one. I spoke with some learners and their parents and carers and I was also able to network with a huge range of organisations and finally put some faces to the names.”
We look to run these twice a year at key times, October and April, so young people and families are able to gain current information regarding post 16 options and provisions. We invite all young people from Year 9, 10, and 11 who have EHC plans in Telford and Wrekin and then also young people who are year 12 and 13 that are NEET to support their exploration and decision process to support engagement.
We have held these at various sites across Telford and always welcome feedback from all parties to assist in informing future events.
SCHOOL UPDATE
FutureFocus Careers Advisers in schools have been busy this term making sure we have ‘Intended Destinations’ for all our current Year 11 students. Within the next month we will be gathering ‘September Guarantee’ information from our local post 16 providers and then following up with students where we can see there is a gap in any ‘offers of learning' for their post 16 progression. Advisers will also start to arrange Year 10 group work sessions in school, completing choices checklist booklets. This information together with meetings with key staff in school will enable us to be well prepared moving forward in the next academic year, particularly around those young people likely to be at risk of becoming NEET.
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