Closeburn House and
Maben House
Dumfries and Galloway
29 November 2011
Education Scotland inspect schools in order to let parents1 and
young people know whether their school2 provides a good
education. Inspectors also discuss with staff how they can
improve the quality of care and education.
At the beginning of the inspection, we ask the headteacher/senior
managers and staff about the strengths of the school, what needs
to improve, and how they know. We use the information they
give us to help us plan what we are going to look at. During the
inspection, we go into classes and join other activities in which
young people are involved. We also gather the views of young
people, parents, staff and members of the local community. We
find their views very helpful and use them together with the other
information we have collected to arrive at our view of the quality
of care and education.
This report tells you what we found during the inspection and the
quality of care and education in the service. We describe how
well young people are doing, how good the service is at helping
them to learn and how well it cares for them. We comment on
how well staff, parents and young people work together and how
they go about improving the service. We also comment on how
well the service works with other groups in the community,
including services which support young people. Finally, we focus
on how well the service is led and how staff help the service
achieve its aims.
If you would like to learn more about our inspection of the
service, please visit www.educationscotland.gov.uk. Here you
can find analyses of questionnaire returns from young people,
parents and staff, and details about young people’s examination
performance. We will not provide questionnaire analyses where
the numbers of returns are so small that they could identify
individuals.
1
Throughout this report, the term ‘parents’ should be taken to include foster carers,
residential care staff and carers who are relatives or friends.
2
The term ‘school’ includes the nursery class or classes where appropriate.
Contents
1. The service
2. Particular strengths of the service
3. How well do children and young people learn and achieve?
4. How well do staff work with others to support children and young
people’s learning?
5. Are staff and children and young people actively involved in
improving their service community?
6. Does the service have high expectations of all children and young
people?
7. Does the service have a clear sense of direction?
8. What happens next?
1. The service
Closeburn House and Maben House form an independent residential
service situated on two sites. The service provides education and care
for young people aged nine to 16 years with additional support needs
including significant social, emotional and behavioural needs from
local authorities across the UK. The roll was ten when the inspection
was carried out in October 2011. Nine young people were receiving
residential care and one was attending daily.
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2. Particular strengths of the service
•
The friendly ethos and positive relationships amongst staff and
young people.
•
Partnerships with parents, other agencies and the local community
that extend young people’s learning experiences.
•
Preparing young people for moving on from the service.
3. How well do children and young people learn and achieve?
Learning and achievement
Teachers have established positive relationships with young people
and this helps them to feel safe and included. Overall, young people
participate well in lessons and respond best when they are actively
involved in learning. However, much of their work involves textbook
activities that they complete on their own. Young people need more
opportunities to learn through working with others to find solutions and
to work things out for themselves. They are gaining confidence in
learning and in their ability to achieve. They are not yet sufficiently
involved in evaluating their own progress and thinking about what they
need to do to improve.
Young people achieve success in the classrooms and beyond. They
are improving their personal and social skills and developing positive
attitudes towards others. Most young people have a good awareness
of healthy lifestyles and take part in a range of physical activities in
school and in the local community. They are developing their
citizenship skills through charitable fundraising. A few young people
take part in work experience programmes that help them develop skills
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for life and work. Almost all young people have their achievements
recognised through the Award Scheme Development and
Accreditation Network (ASDAN).
Overall, young people are making steady progress in English language
and mathematics. Most young people achieve National Qualification
units and courses in a range of subjects at Access 2, 3 and
Intermediate 1 levels. Staff now need to develop better approaches to
tracking young people’s progress to ensure that they are achieving at
an appropriate rate and at a sufficiently high level.
Curriculum and meeting learning needs
The curriculum provides young people with learning experiences in the
eight areas of Curriculum for Excellence. It gives them suitable
opportunities to gain National Qualifications. The service is still at the
early stages of implementing Curriculum for Excellence and there is
considerable scope to develop more enjoyable and relevant
programmes of study. Young people have a range of opportunities for
physical activities and various organisations provide activities to help
young people know how to keep themselves safe and healthy.
However, there is no well-planned programme for health and
wellbeing. The service gives good attention to preparing and
supporting young people move on from the service.
Most staff know young people well and interact with them in a caring
and supportive manner. In a few classes, staff set tasks and activities
at the right level of difficulty for young people. However, the majority
of activities are not interesting enough and do not motivate young
people to learn. Staff work with partners to identify young people’s
needs when they come to the service. Young people’s specific needs
are not always addressed well. They need to be given more
opportunities to learn how to recognise their own feelings and to
behave well in different situations. Young people have regular
opportunities to discuss aspects of their progress with their key worker
and key teacher. However, learning targets within their individual
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educational programmes are not always sufficiently challenging or
clearly linked to their specific needs. The service regularly reviews
young people’s progress involving parents, partners and pupils.
4. How well do staff work with others to support children and
young people’s learning?
The service has developed strong partnerships with parents who value
the support of the staff. Parents feel welcome and are able to contact
staff if they have any issues or concerns. The service has effective
arrangements to gather the views of parents and deal with complaints.
The service has positive links with local sports, health and leisure
facilities that extend young people’s learning activities. Staff liaise well
with services in young people’s home areas so that they can continue
to use similar facilities when they leave the service. A full range of
agencies and authorities attend planning meetings for young people.
5. Are staff and children and young people actively involved in
improving their service community?
Young people are involved in improving the service through the pupil
council and contributing ideas in working towards Eco-Schools
Scotland awards. However, they are not involved in giving their views
on how to improve learning. Teaching staff have started to observe
each other’s practice. They need to be more fully involved in
evaluating the work of the service and setting future priorities for
improvements. Most staff do not have a shared understanding of what
the service does well and where it needs to improve. Some priorities
in the improvement plan are leading to more positive outcomes for
young people. For example, young people now have access to a
wider range of National Qualifications and they are benefitting from a
more practical approach to science. Staff now need to ensure that all
new developments are making a difference to young people’s learning
and achievements.
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6. Does the service have high expectations of all children and
young people?
Staff know young people well and are committed to providing a caring
and supportive learning environment. They understand their
responsibilities for protecting young people and ensuring their safety.
Young people’s achievements are recognised and celebrated through
assemblies, achievement certificates and in wall displays. Young
people take part in activities that help them to learn about different
races and cultures. Staff have high expectations for young people’s
attendance. They do not always have suitably high expectations for
what young people can achieve across different aspects of their
learning and behaviour. Young people are supported to make healthy
eating choices. The service’s approach to promoting health and
wellbeing needs to be further developed in consultation with the
children and young people.
7. Does the service have a clear sense of direction?
Staff share a sense of responsibility to provide young people with
successful learning experiences. They now need to focus more on
improving learning, teaching and the curriculum. Most teachers are
relatively new to the service. Team working within the education staff
should continue to be developed. Staff need to build a shared
understanding of high quality learning and teaching that will meet the
needs of all learners. The Head of Education should maintain a strong
role in driving forward positive changes. She needs to challenge and
support staff to improve outcomes for young people.
8. What happens next?
We will carry out a follow-through inspection visit within one year of
publication of this report and will report to parents on the extent to
which the service has improved. Following that visit, we may continue
to check the improvements the service has made. We may also carry
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out a second follow-through inspection within two years of the original
inspection report. If a second follow-through inspection visit is
necessary then it will result in another report to parents on the extent of
improvement that the service has made.
We have agreed the following areas for improvement with the service.
•
Continue to develop the curriculum and a shared understanding of
high quality learning and teaching.
•
Take better account of the specific needs of young people to
support their achievements and health and wellbeing.
•
Develop more rigorous approaches to self-evaluation to bring about
continuous improvement.
6
Quality indicators help schools and inspectors to judge what is good
and what needs to be improved in the work of the service. You can find
these quality indicators in the HMIE publication How good is our school
Here are the evaluations for Closeburn House and Maben House.
Improvements in performance
Learners’ experiences
Meeting learning needs
satisfactory
satisfactory
weak
We also evaluated the following aspects of the work of the service.
The curriculum
Improvement through self-evaluation
Managing Inspector: Olwynne Clark
29 November 2011
7
satisfactory
weak
When we write reports, we use the following word scale so that our
readers can see clearly what our judgments mean.
excellent
very good
good
means
means
means
satisfactory
weak
unsatisfactory
means
means
means
outstanding, sector leading
major strengths
important strengths with some areas
for improvement
strengths just outweigh weaknesses
important weaknesses
major weaknesses
If you would like to find out more about our inspections or get an
electronic copy of this report, please go
to www.educationscotland.gov.uk.
Please contact us if you want to know how to get the report in a
different format, for example, in a translation, or if you wish to
comment about any aspect of our inspections. You can contact us
at Enquiries@educationscotland.gsi.gov.uk or write to us at BMCT,
Education Scotland, Denholm House, Almondvale Business Park,
Almondvale Way, Livingston EH54 6GA.
Text phone users can contact us on 01506 600 236. This is a service
for deaf users. Please do not use this number for voice calls as the
line will not connect you to a member of staff.
You can find our complaints procedure on our website
www.educationscotland.gov.uk or alternatively you can contact our
Complaints Manager, at the address above or by
telephoning 01506 600259.
Crown Copyright 2011
Education Scotland