Welfare Support

LwLAT Education Welfare Team

The Trust has appointed an Education Welfare Team to support the schools' in house practitioners. Led by an experienced Senior Education Welfare Officer and qualified Social Worker, the team support the schools in a variety of ways to improve attendance and welfare.

The aim of the Welfare Team is to:

• Develop and maintain a whole school culture that promotes the benefits of high attendance by having a clear vision for attendance improvement, evaluating and monitoring expectations and processes, oversight of data analysis and communicating messages to students and parents.
• Support the school in achieving a clear school attendance policy which all staff, students and parents understand and with a whole school approach where every staff member has a role to fulfil in improving attendance.
• Accurately complete admission and attendance registers and have effective day to day processes in place to follow up absence.
• Robustly track, monitor and analyse attendance and absence data to identify students or cohorts that require support with their attendance and put effective strategies in place.
• Build strong relationships with families, listen to, understand, and where possible, remove barriers to attendance.
• Share information and work collaboratively with partners when absence is at risk of becoming persistent or severe.
• Formalise support where absence persists and voluntary support is not being engaged with.

The action carried out by our Attendance and Welfare Team is designed to:

• Support students to improve their school attendance and eliminate any potential barriers, by working together using trusting and healthy relationships.
• Enable students to reach their full academic potential and increase their successful life chances, as new experiences, new opportunities and new skills are offered and created.

Core Activity

All our schools have their own attendance teams that carry out day to day duties that impact on student welfare and attendance. The core support offer is the day to day support that the school attendance teams receive from the Trust Welfare Support Team. The core support is limited to ‘low level’ cases and where attendance support capacity and additional advice and guidance is required. 

Additional Welfare Support

For persistent cases or those that the school deems to be high level or high risk, the Welfare Team will undertake the core activity but supplement it with support from a number of external agencies. A selection of those agencies are identified below: