PALAC Project for Looked-After-Children Comes to the College

A recent project at Bournemouth and Poole College, Promoting the Achievement of Looked-After-Children/ Care-Leavers (PALAC), alongside the UCL Centre for Inclusive Education, focused on the engagement and attendance of our Looked-After-Children and deep-dived into this area with other professionals. 

The project allowed for multi-agency working, research and self-reflection on what we were currently doing and what we could do to enhance the support offered to our care-experienced young people. This is where we designed and put together a ‘LAC pack’ and a key worker system to ensure our support systems were robust and aimed to support those care-experienced young people to thrive and achieve. 

Within this project, we also looked at every angle of support, securing funding through our engagement team for our Looked-After-Children to be able to partake in educational visits and enrichment free of charge. A second ongoing project that we have been a part of is the Inclusion Quality Mark (IQM), which focuses on the quality of areas of support at the college, we have just submitted our evidence for the standard around Safeguarding and Wellbeing of our student and awaiting our first accreditation walk! Another exciting aspect is our MHFA train the trainer. 

One of our Mental Health Coaches within Wellbeing has undertaken intense training and is now an approved Mental Health First Aid Instructor. Our mission and aim is to have all staff at the college MHFA trained to provide our students with the highest quality of care and support in situations that may need it the most. We have successfully made a dent in training a small percentage of our own staffing team.