Alternative Provision Specialist Taskforce

The Alternative Provision Specialist Taskforce (APST) aims to improve the skills and capabilities of alternative provision (AP) schools in order to reduce 11-16-year-old children’s involvement in violence and support them to re-engage in education.

Funded by the Department for Education (DfE) in England, APST places at least four of the following eight professionals in AP schools who then work together for at least three days a week:

• a speech and language therapist
• a mental health professional
• a post-16 transition coach
• a youth worker
• an educational psychologist
• a family support worker
• a youth justice worker,
• and a social worker

AP schools decide whether the support provided by specialists is offered to all children or targeted at particular children.The programme also aims to improve relationships between AP schools and local agencies and to upskill other members of AP school staff in order to benefit all children in the setting.

The 22 APST schools in this programme were in serious violence hotspots. YEF funded an impact evaluation of APST. It aimed to identify whether APST had an impact on two primary outcomes: whether year 11 children subsequently enrolled in post-16 study and whether years 7-10 children reintegrated into mainstream school in the following academic year. It also aimed to identify the impact on a range of secondary outcomes, including years 7-10 attendance, year 11 attainment in English and maths, and years 7-11 social and emotional difficulties (as measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ)). For all but the SDQ outcomes, the evaluation used a difference-in-differences (DiD) methodology. This compared the difference in outcomes for all KS3 and KS4 pupils both before and after the introduction of APST among two groups of schools: those in which APST was introduced (the treatment group) and all other AP schools (the comparison group). The change in the difference in outcomes between the two groups before and after the introduction of APST provides an estimate of its impact. The treatment group consisted of 3,370 children in 2021/22 and 3,780 children in 2022/23. For the SDQ, baseline and endline data were collected from AP schools (22 APST schools and 21 matched comparison schools) and compared.

An implementation and process evaluation was also conducted to explore the perceptions of those involved,facilitators and barriers to delivery, unintended consequences and cost. This featured three rounds of data collection, each including surveys with APST professionals, project coordinators, and AP senior leadership teams(SLT) (with around 120 responses in each round); interviews with SLTs, DfE and strategic partners (59 conducted in total); nine visits to seven case study schools; and reviews of programme documentation and data. The evaluation covered the delivery of APST from November 2021 until August 2023. A report of findings and outcomes including a third year of delivery will be published in summer 2026.