Best Practice

Military children: What kind of in-school support do they need?

Pupil Premium advice/guidance Case studies Vulnerable children
The Service Pupil Premium amounts to £310 per child. How can secondary schools make a difference to the wellbeing of service children with little to no budget? Louise Fetigan, founder of the charity Little Troopers, advises


There are more than 100,000 children in the UK who have a parent actively serving in the British Armed Forces and you might be surprised to learn that the vast majority of these children attend a school with fewer than 10 other service children. In fact, it is not unusual for schools to have just one service child on roll.

It is often assumed that service children do not need targeted support unless a child is in crisis or a school has a large cohort of military children, but I would disagree.

While service children do of course benefit from broader school wellbeing initiatives (in the same way their peers do), all service children can at times face unique practical and emotional challenges that have the potential to negatively affect their wellbeing and academic performance.

I believe that all schools and school leaders should have a good understanding of these challenges and be equipped with tools to support service pupils as and when needed to ensure they are not disadvantaged by military life.

Last year, the governments of the UK committed to making “getting it right for service children a national education priority” (MoD, 2021a). While we await guidance promised by the Department for Education, there is still plenty that schools can be doing now to have a positive impact.

In England, state schools who have children of service families in years Reception to year 11 can receive the Service Pupil Premium (SPP) funding, which is currently worth £310 per service child who meets the eligibility criteria (MoD, 2021b).

Supporting service children can be particularly tricky for secondary schools given that most of the school day is spent moving between lessons and teaching staff, but it is possible to provide on-going, targeted pastoral support and the good news is that you do not need a large SPP budget to make a difference.


School transition

Research shows that the service children most likely to be negatively impacted by military life are those who are most mobile (Sealous & Walker, 2020).

While an increasing number of military families are choosing to settle in one location, there are still thousands in the British Armed Forces community for whom moving house every few years or less is the norm. It is not uncommon for service children to attend eight or more different schools by the time they are 18. Often these moves take place during the academic year, making it even more challenging for everyone involved.

From a practical point of view, moving schools can result in children missing or even having to redo parts of the curriculum. For students studying for their GCSEs or A levels, they might have to switch exam boards or choose different options entirely.

While schools cannot remove all of these challenges, focusing on the transition point – when students arrive and leave a setting – is a good place to start in helping to make military families feel welcomed and supported.

Rather than just relying on the Common Transfer File for details on a new service student, the pastoral lead or form tutor should actively engage with the family and the previous school in advance of the child starting.

Find out how many schools they have been to and how the child has coped with moving in the past.

Do not just limit the conversation to academic subjects. Show an interest in the child’s hobbies and, where possible, enable them to continue these in your school.

If they are on a school sports team, can you make space for them on your team or arrange for them to meet other players on their first day? Or can you buddy them up with another service child or a child with similar interests to encourage friendship in those crucial first weeks?

Find out more about the dynamic at home. Has the serving parent been deployed recently? Do they regularly work away from home and will this change with the house move? Are the family living closer or further away from extended family? And when are they moving into their new home? In rare cases children might still be living in a hotel on their first day of school.

Equally, when a service child leaves your school, be the first to open up a conversation with their new school and provide them with as much information as possible to best support the child’s move and help them to thrive in their new setting.


Forces Life Club

Another low-cost but effective way to support service children is to bring them together regularly in a lunch or after-school club. It might be weekly, monthly or just once a term.

Service children do not automatically know each other and introducing them to other children with similar life experiences can be hugely reassuring and help to nurture new, supportive friendships. It can also help children to see that they are part of a wider network of military children across the British Armed Forces community, which can foster feelings of pride and belonging.

If you only have one service pupil on roll, consider connecting with other local schools, either in-person or virtually.

When it comes to running a Forces Life Club, children should be encouraged to take ownership of these sessions. They might decide they want to chat about military life – exploring topics such as resilience, change, separation, and deployment, or they might like to use the sessions as an opportunity to tell others about military life through a podcast, assembly or community outreach project (to this end, Little Troopers has a free Forces Life Club pack as well as other free resources and activity ideas to help schools facilitate these approaches).


Change and uncertainty

It is important to understand that even once a family has “settled” into the area, that their circumstances and family dynamic might continue to change. Military life is often uncertain and unpredictable. The serving parent could be deployed at short notice, sent on a long exercise or an unexpected house move might suddenly arise.

Keep communicating regularly with your military families to be abreast of any changes at home and make sure you have plans in place to support service children during more challenging times.

For instance, if a parent is deployed to a different time zone, can you make allowances for the child to leave lessons to contact their parent? Be aware that if their parent is a submariner or in the special forces, they might have little to no contact for months at a time which can be very hard.

Our charity also offers the Little Troopers Military Child Wellbeing course, which can help service children to work through some of these unique challenges and empowers them with techniques to handle change and uncertainty, now and in the future.


Conclusion

Ultimately, if we are going to stop service children from being disadvantaged then we have to stop labelling them as such. Military life brings its challenges, but given the right tools, service children should be able to harness their unique experiences to become confident, adaptable and resilient adults. Schools can and should play a big part in making this happen and together we can make sure that every service child has the capability to reach their full potential and ambitions.

  • Louise Fetigan is the founder of the charity Little Troopers, which provides secondary schools with free resources, including a teen podcast, to use with service children in the classroom. Find out more at www.littletroopers.net/little-troopers-at-school


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