Now that the focus has abated somewhat from the DTR, we thought it would be interesting to look at who is responsible for the education of the children of defence personnel serving overseas. This task falls to a tri-service body within the MOD called Service Children’s Education (SCE), whose Chief Executive is David Wadsworth.

What is particularly interesting about SCA is that while it delivers the UK curriculum in some far-flung settings, its exam results would place it amongst the top performing UK local authorities (LAs). It also scored highly in OFSTED inspections. So what could UK LAs, who spend so much on consultants, learn from the success of SCE? The obvious answer is that the army is probably far better at being able to deliver discipline, although according to SCE, ‘school rules will be in line with arrangements found in UK LA schools. Corporal punishment is not used and in the unlikely event of a pupil’s exclusion from school there are clearly established procedures for parental appeal’. Interestingly SCE has its own Inspection Advisory Service that supports schools and works with OFSTED. Service families also have access to the Children’s Education Advisory Service (CEAS) prior to deployment overseas and before returning to the UK.

In terms of staffing, the main state competitor for SCE would be the European Schools programme. The main differences seem to be that while SCE does not necessarily require a foreign language for teachers wanting to work in Germany for example (all EU school applicants must be bilingual in two major European languages) the key differences are (aside from stringent security checks) that the pay and conditions are far better in EU schools.

www.sceschools.com