In the era of evidence-informed practice, unregistered alternative provision (AP) faces calls to account for itself – and rightly so.
Throughout the education system, we need to eliminate ineffective or ‘tick-box’ practices and, instead, do what will really help our young people flourish.
The reasons for AP’s existence aren’t going away. These range from an increase in unmet additional learning needs (SEND) and rising persistent absence – including emotionally-based school avoidance (EBSA) – to the growing number of exclusions.

A new course from Enemy of Boredom Academy: ‘Preparing for Adulthood: My Life, My Way’
Government uncertainty
There’s also an air of uncertainty caused by the UK Government’s ongoing Change Programme in the SEND and AP system.
As far as we know, we’re still expecting the DfE to publish new National Standards for AP at some point.
We welcome this because we think there are a lot of AP suppliers in the system who don’t aspire to be a school, and yet are eager to demonstrate that what they do is of sound quality.

Enemy of Boredom invested in flight simulators to help its students regulate and switch off when needed
Three main challenges
At a high level, we think the three main challenges for the AP system to answer are:
1) How do we offer value for money to commissioning bodies?
2) How do we ensure that young people are making progress in our care?
3) How do we help them engage with wider education and employment?
We’ve taken an unflinching look at what we do in Enemy of Boredom Academy, because if we can’t find satisfactory answers to these questions ourselves, then we believe we should stop what we’re doing now and do something else instead.
Sharing our findings
The reason we want to share our findings is that we want to contribute to the discussion about SEND and AP.
We also want to encourage others to reflect in similar ways in the interest of doing our collective best for the young people in our educational system.
Please read more here:
https://eobacademy.com/maybe-schools-have-something-to-learn-from-alternative-provision-too/