School of Education

Evaluation of Inclusion Plus: Reducing school exclusions

Launched in October 2013, Inclusion Plus was a Public Social Partnership initiative designed to help reduce school exclusions in a set of schools in Dundee. It was an innovative multi-agency project based on the Public Social Partnership model (PSP). Government and others see the PSP model as a strategic partnering arrangement actively involving the third sector in the design and commissioning of public services.

The aim of the evaluation report was two-fold:

1. to evidence the impact of the Inclusion Plus project on the levels of school exclusion in Dundee, while assessing the contributions of each partner organisation to this process;

2. to evaluate the success of the Public Social Partnership model in terms of improving partnership working at the service and funding levels.

The evaluation findings suggested that there are certain factors in successful partnership working that are more important than others, but this should not be used to ignore the complex and multi-faceted nature of school exclusions at the local level. And the complexities attached to the Inclusion Plus initiative should not be underestimated. This was an initiative that has brought together three distinct agencies with their own ways of working and introduced them into four very different school settings.

The main conclusions were that:

• Individually, the three agencies have proved a successful addition to the 4 schools;

• Collectively, as Inclusion Plus, they have not delivered an effective working partnership;

• Partnerships between agencies and four schools have been more effective and productive that the public social partnership;

• The agencies that comprise Inclusion Plus have been a valuable and complementary service to the schools which in the main is appreciated by school professionals, pupils and their parents. That said, there were already existing professional relationships and sets of working practices that had been established over time. The agencies of Inclusion Plus have found that it takes time to build their own sets of relationships on top of these, a factor that impacts on their ability to work as an effective partnership.