ABC LEEDS PROTOCOL FOR VOLUNTARY & STATUTORY ORGANISATIONS AND LEEDS SCHOOLS

INTRODUCTION - PROTOCOLS FOR AGENCY WORK IN LEEDS SCHOOLS

The Children Act 2004 sets an agenda that requires a co-ordinated cross-service approach to all health intervention and prevention work through schools. Agencies are an extremely valuable resource for schools that wish to create community partnerships to promote healthy lifestyles and safety for young people. Schools can benefit enormously from working with agencies within both the curricular and extended services context. In 2003-4, school-agency protocols were developed to support school-agency working through the founder ABC partnership project. The following protocols build on this initial work, reflecting the changing agenda brought about through the Children Act 2004, Choosing Health White Paper 2004, the DfES 5 Year Strategy and specifically the rapidly developing Healthy School and Extended Services agendas. These protocols provide a framework within which schools and agencies can work to ensure a best value partnership.

There are two essential types of agency involvement in schools:

1. Agency Support for the PSHE and citizenship curriculum:
   • Effective pre-planning with the agency can lead to improved learning and skills for children and young people which in turn would lead to improved health choices and behaviours.
   • Effective pre-planning should also lead to improved 'process outcomes' for the school which ensures that agency input enables rather than disables capacity within the schools to deliver a quality PSHE and citizenship curriculum. Agencies are experts in their own field, usually have youth-work experience and can provide useful materials and ways of working in the classroom. Their expertise could support : improved schemes of work; deliver sessions; training for teachers, team-teaching/ mentoring or coaching for teachers; train the trainer scenarios to support lead teachers with dissemination of new materials/teaching styles to teams.
2. Agency Support for the extended school:
   • Agencies can help support the extended schools agenda through creating activities before, during and after schools hours. Many agencies are community led, they identify specific health problems within in an area enabling them to create resources to tackle these and produce positive outcomes.