Why supporting Armed Forces children should be a priority for all schools

Louise Fetigan

There are thousands of children in UK schools who have a parent serving in the British Armed Forces. The exact number is unknown, but the latest figures suggest there are 79,000 service pupils in England alone. These children often experience unique challenges that are unfamiliar to their civilian peers such as being separated from their serving parent (or parents, in the case of dual-serving families) for long periods of time, as well as moving home and school frequently.

Military life is typically transient and unpredictable; many children thrive on the adventure, but the myth that all forces children are resilient all of the time is pervasive and unhelpful. Most will encounter harder times when they would benefit from additional support at home and in school. Latest figures suggest that half of military personnel worry about the negative impact of service life on their child and these issues were the driving force behind my personal decision to set up a UK charity dedicated to supporting military children back in 2011 when my own daughter struggled with the impact of repeated and sometimes concurrent Armed Forces deployment and separation.

A challenge for all schools

It is easy to assume that these issues only apply to schools with large cohorts of military children – those usually located next to military bases. However, a 2020 Government review, ‘Living in

Our Shoes’, which attempted to capture the lived experience of Armed Forces Families across the UK in more detail, found that the vast majority of service children attend a school with fewer than ten military children.

My own experience - having worked with military families for the last decade and having also seen my own daughter be the only military child in a school - is that these are the children who often struggle the most. Being a member of a forces family is a lifestyle; it is not just a family member’s job. So, to be the only military child in a school can feel very lonely and isolating, especially if there is a lack of acknowledgement or engagement from teaching staff who may be dismissive or simply lack understanding and fail to see the need for targeted support.

In 2011, Ousted noted that there is a correlation between Armed Forces life and service children’s wellbeing, particularly for families who are very mobile and during periods of deployments. Schools are in a unique position to bridge the support gap for these children, particularly during times when families are coping with stress and change at home. Schools can be a safe, neutral space for children to share their worries and work through their emotions - if given the chance.

As well as emotional pressures at home, service children also face practical challenges in school. The transition from one setting to the next is not always smooth and children can find

themselves struggling to catch-up and repeating or even missing out on essential topics from the curriculum. These issues are felt more acutely in secondary education, particularly in GCSE and A-Level years, but primary students who are not properly supported also risk being impacted.

Research is unclear as to whether service children’s attainment is statistically different when we look at the national picture (initial findings suggest it is not), but in my experience of talking to hundreds of individual families, lack of consistency in curriculum delivery is a problem and is certainly a common frustration amongst military families. The latest Tri-Service Attitude Survey shows that just under a quarter of Tri-Service families with school age children say they have experienced difficulties with their children’s schooling in the past year. Again, these challenges are usually magnified in schools with small numbers of military children who are not accustomed to supporting highly mobile students and do not have the systems and processes to better manage these circumstances.

The limitations of Service Pupil Premium

In 2011, the Government introduced the Service Pupil Premium (SPP) in England to help plug the gap in support for service children. SPP payments have been marginally increased this year and the guidelines state that schools should

Schools can be a safe, neutral space for children to share their worries and work through their emotions - if given the chance.

use the budget to offer ‘mainly pastoral support during challenging times and to help mitigate the negative impact on service children or family mobility or parental deployment.’

In schools with hundreds or military children I’ve seen fantastic examples of this budget being used effectively to recruit dedicated members of pastoral staff and roll out specific support programmes and initiatives. Yet for schools with one military child, £310 doesn’t stretch very far and can often end up lumped in with the Pupil Premium budget or simply used to fund the child’s breakfast or after school sessions resulting in a missed opportunity to have a beneficial impact on that service child.

The Government has recently launched a revised best practice guide for Service Pupil Premium, but none of the examples listed in the guide include schools with just one or two military pupils. In fact, the school in the guide with the lowest number of service pupils is 33, which would give them an SPP budget of more than £10,000. There is no guidance for how a school with a limited budget of just £310 or £620 is expected to support service students. As a charity, we truly believe that even small amounts of SPP

can be utilized beneficially to provide pastoral support for every service child. Yes, it takes a little more imagination, but it can be done.

Ofsted reportedly scrutinizes school spending of SPP but the suggested ways of spending the money are open to interpretation and can be a thorny issue amongst parents who often disagree about what schools should do and how SPP directly benefits their child. This is complicated further by a delay in when schools receive funding, which can leave them with a short-fall if they have a highly transient population of service students.

Recommendations without change

During the last few years, there has been a flurry of research into Armed Forces life and subsequent recommendations at policy-level. On the one hand, it’s great to see the lived experience of forces families being better understood and a recognition of the need for targeted support reinforced by a growing body of evidence-based research. I really do welcome this and I am also pleased to be invited into these conversations as a representative for military children. However, as a parent to a service child myself, I also get increasingly frustrated at the lack of action and the slow speed of change.

My daughter was seven when I started this journey. She is now 17 and about to move into higher education. In that time, there have been countless research studies and recommendations published, but no Government-led nationwide initiatives or programmes that have fundamentally improved her school experience – it has simply been the luck of the draw depending on which school she has attended and how each setting has chosen to support service children, or not. This is true for lots of children whose parents served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Children who are now in their teens and twenties and did not always get the additional support they needed at the time because support for military children in education is inconsistent. It’s a postcode lottery

for families, with pockets of amazing things happening in some schools and nothing in others.

Appetite for action

I know first-hand that there is a huge appetite for change, not just from military families but from teachers too. This was reflected in the ‘Living in Our Shoes’ report where one of the main challenges identified by teachers was a lack of understanding about the military lifestyle. Teachers want access to training, guidance and effective tools that can be deployed in the classroom to support students. At the moment this is a missing piece of the puzzle and while the conversation remains academic, there will still be far too many children who fall through the cracks. In order to achieve fair and consistent support for all service children within education then we need to provide access to evidence-based, tangible resources that any school can use, whether they have one service pupil or two hundred.

This is the reason that Little Troopers launched a dedicated At School programme in 2019 to try and reach and benefit as many military children as possible in schools today; not tomorrow. Working alongside headteachers, teachers, educational psychologists, behavioural experts and play therapists we developed a primary school resource pack and Military Child Wellbeing Course template to provide the grassroots support that schools are eager to receive. An online resource hub and Military Child Wellbeing Course for secondary schools has followed and this June (2021) Little Troopers is running a series of free virtual workshops for primary schools across England to attend with their service pupils. We are also delighted to have just partnered with the Welsh Government to provide storybooks and wellbeing course templates to primary schools throughout Wales. The idea of every single service child in the country having access to immediate, military-specific resources is exactly what we set out to achieve and I’d love to see other nations do something similar, whether they chose to use Little Troopers resources or not.

Supporting military children today, not tomorrow

While we wait for Government action, what can schools be doing immediately to benefit military children? Well firstly, simply taking the time to understand what life is like for service students and their families is a crucial step. This is about recognizing that support is not just needed during times of crisis, but that day-to-day military life can be a rollercoaster of challenge and change. Teachers can be tuned in to the ebbs and flows of each child’s circumstances and recognize that everyone responds to this life differently. All children have different needs at different times and teaching staff should be prepared to adapt to those needs.

For some children, they might struggle whenever their parent is away from home. For others, they only need support during long deployments or house moves. It is important not to forget about children who live ‘unaccompanied’ and only see their serving parent at weekends or less frequently; just because this is their ‘norm’ doesn’t mean they never find it challenging. It’s also about spotting the signs that children are struggling. For some, it might manifest in behavioural change whereas for others it will be more noticeable in their school performance.

Secondly, I think all schools would benefit from representing military life more. At times, the Armed Forces community feels like a hidden community that is never talked about in school. Schools can mitigate this by adding storybooks about military children to their library, featuring military uniforms in dressing-up boxes and incorporating stories and life experiences into classroom activities. Remember that from a military child’s perspective, talking about military life is not about promoting conflict or playing with weapons, it’s about fostering a feeling of inclusion and embracing diversity by sharing children’s different experiences. There is also huge value in encouraging service pupils to directly share their own stories and explore their emotions

- if they feel comfortable. This can be done in small groups of service pupils or with their civilian peers if appropriate. It might be a one-off workshop or better, a more regular meeting or session.

Strategic approach

Longer-term, holistic support for service students should be delivered as part of a school’s strategic approach to early intervention and ‘whole school wellbeing’. Following the eight principles of the Department of Education’s wellbeing framework, schools should be: training staff; working more closely with parents and carers; enabling student voice, including Armed Forces life in teaching and learning to promote resilience and support social and emotional learning; identifying need; and offering targeted support - all under the umbrella of promoting and respecting the diversity of children who have parents serving in the British Armed Forces.

I strongly believe that given the right tools, military children can use their experiences to become confident, adaptable and resilient adults and that schools can and should play a big part in making this happen. Let’s stop seeing service children as ‘disadvantaged’ and start helping them to reach their full potential as individual children with individual capabilities and ambitions. Let’s stop mitigating the perceived negative impact of military life and instead embrace our Armed Forces community and the children that are a part of it. Let’s see this as an opportunity to provide a little extra support to tens of thousands of children across the UK that could have a huge positive impact on their wellbeing and empower them to better navigate challenge and change, both now and in the future.

Louise Fetigan is forces veteran and founder of military children’s charity, Little Troopers https://www.littletroopers.net/

References

‘The Pupil Premium Briefing Paper’, March 2021, House of Commons Library The Pupil Premium - House of Commons Library (parliament.uk)

Ministry of Defence, ‘FAMCAS Tri-service continuous attitude survey’, July 2020, Tri-service families continuous attitude survey: 2020 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Selous, Andrew, ‘Living in Our Shoes: Understanding the Needs of UK Armed Forces Families’, June 2020: Living in our shoes full report (publishing.service.gov.uk)

Ofsted, ‘Children in Service Families’, May 2011: https://www.gov.uk/ government/publications/children-in-service-families

Ministry of Defence, ‘FAMCAS Tri-service continuous attitude survey’, July 2020, Tri-service families continuous attitude survey: 2020 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Ministry of Defence’, Service Pupil Premium: examples of best practice’, September 2020 Service Pupil Premium: examples of best practice (updated 3 September 2020) - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Selous, Andrew, ‘Living in Our Shoes: Understanding the Needs of UK Armed Forces Families’, June 2020: Living in our shoes full report (publishing.service.gov.uk)