Beyond the classroom
Newbattle Community High School's 'holistic' approach
The term 'holistic school' is not an easy one to define. It has been used in connection with certain English schools, but not in Scotland. Look it up on the internet and you're most likely to encounter courses on alternative medicine.
The phrase may imply education as a lifelong process. It may loosely encapsulate the notion of partnership with parents. It can refer specifically to schools that offer community services alongside formal education.
Fundamentally, the idea of holistic schooling suggests that education is most successful and inclusive when it addresses circumstances that exist outside the classroom but which affect what goes on inside it.
Take, for example, the P7 summer camps run each year by the primary cluster schools for Newbattle Community High School in Midlothian. Up to 200 young people take part.
It's an initiative designed partly to assist the transition to secondary education. However, its aims are broader than that. The camps are run by a schools community team that includes not only teachers but also social work professionals, police officers and representatives from the local churches. The events are just one way of demonstrating that school life is part of community life and that they have an impact on each other.
Working with communities
Newbattle is one of the new breed of community schools promoted by the Scottish Executive. It does more than invite the community onto its premises for further education opportunities (the traditional model of community schooling). It offers a focus for parents and a wide range of community partners, including local businesses and community activists as well as social work and other child professionals.
Newbattle prioritises early intervention for youngsters with personal problems and a 'one-door' system for referring individuals to the appropriate professional agencies. It does this through an Integration Team co-ordinated by an integration manager and including project officers for social work, community education and health. In addition, family learning workers are key contributors to the team.
The Newbattle philosophy is that better support for families will equip young people to do better at school. Because they do better at school, they will do better at life too.
The High School serves a diverse cluster of communities, including some of the most disadvantaged areas in Midlothian. The question is, whether a school that prioritises family difficulties and addresses broader community issues will earn the same stigma attached to socially deprived areas.
Headteacher Colin Taylor doesn't think so. In the first place, the range of initiatives and facilities on offer means that Newbattle is not simply addressing personal and family problems. The school's concerns are wider than that. Newbattle Community High is perceived, Colin says, to be 'wrestling' positively with deprivation issues and developing a 'family feeling' that emphasises good values, positive attitudes and constructive relationships. This affects all pupils.
A specialised breakfast club, for example, that arranges to collect children who have a poor attendance record, exists alongside a breakfast club available to all children. There is also an O-Zone health advice and drop-in centre that operates at lunchtime and intervals. Here, staff members use a consciously 'holistic' approach in promoting sexual health, respectful relationships and a range of other health issues. Bereavement counselling for young people has also been developed in conjunction with the Richmond's Hope Children's Bereavement Project based in Edinburgh.
Colin believes that though there are undoubtedly workload implications in offering such services, the teaching staff 'can see real benefits of working with other professionals. We are keen not to see the Integration Team as a bolt-on mechanism for behavioural difficulties but as a different way of thinking.'
Developing resources and projects
This 'new thinking' extends into the cluster primary schools. The £200,000 annual budget given to the Integration Team is used to develop resources and projects that benefit all the schools.
Recognising, for example, that playground friction can often have a disruptive spillover effect on classroom time, the Integration Team has worked with five schools to develop Peaceful Playground Initiatives.
In three of the schools, an identified group of children who had difficulty managing their behaviour in the playground were offered the opportunity to participate in organised activities. Additionally, they worked on identifying ways in which they could change their behaviour. Sessions ended with a relaxation period for 'cooling down' before classes began again.
For the other two schools, a whole school programme was devised, involving teachers, playground supervisors and children. Older children were taught new games and, crucially, the skills to teach these games to younger children in their school. As a result, 95 per cent of the older children across the two schools volunteered to become playground 'buddies' for the young children.
There is an underlying assumption in this kind of initiative that school and life are one; that the classroom and the playground are intimately connected.
Each initiative builds on the notion that there is a whole range of impediments to educational achievement – from poverty to playground arguments.
Either these impediments can be addressed without reference to the classroom environment (in which case education itself becomes narrowly academic) or they can be addressed within school time, drawing on school facilities and sharing community experience.
Newbattle Community High School, like countless other schools, offers add-on opportunities that can be located in any school facility – the holiday programmes of canoeing, football, rock climbing and art projects. But these take-it-or-leave-it options do not make for a 'holistic' approach. That can only come from a more rounded approach to education.
Colin Taylor has worked in this part of Midlothian for some 20 years. He has seen the level of problems that stem from social deprivation decrease in that time. Nevertheless, 'some kids still have the problems that their parents had. In 15 years' time it won't be good enough for their kids to be addressing the same issues.'
By combining extra-curricular forms of education with a close attention to community needs and personal circumstances, Newbattle aims to help reduce the cycle of deprivation still further. The school alone isn't a cure-all, but by stretching its definition of education it aims to touch young people at every point of their experience. It's an approach that one might call not merely inclusive but 'holistic'.