Lancashire County Council × Purple Ruler
Alternative Provision · Review & Forward Plan

Lancashire's online provision — the year delivered, and the year designed.

A clear-eyed review of the alternative provision Lancashire County Council commissioned through Purple Ruler in 2025/26 — who it reached, what it taught, and what it changed — followed by the county-wide Academy programme proposed for the year ahead.

Client
Lancashire County Council
Service
AP1 Online Academy
Prepared for
Oscar Marshall · AP Quality & Safeguarding
"Children, young people and their families are safe, healthy and achieve their full potential." Lancashire's vision for Education & Children's Services — the test every outcome below is measured against.

What Lancashire and Purple Ruler built together

Over 2025/26, Lancashire and Purple Ruler worked as a single team to stand up a county-wide online alternative provision — the "AP1" programme. Small, live, teacher-led groups delivered the academic core to pupils who couldn't be in a mainstream classroom, held to one contract, one provider and one safeguarding standard across the whole county. It's a genuine partnership: your team referring and steering, ours teaching, safeguarding and reporting back — week in, week out.

Together it grew into something with real reach and real results: 189 pupils taught across 96 groups in Science, Maths and English, from Key Stage 2 right through to GCSE — young people re-engaged, kept exam-ready, and supported back toward school. This isn't a pilot to evaluate; it's a proven partnership to build on. The pages below recap what we achieved together this year, then set out how it scales into a full Academy model.

RECAP · 01

The year, in Lancashire's own numbers

Every figure is drawn live from Lancashire's course records — the pupils your team placed and the lessons our teachers delivered to them.

189
Pupils supported
Individual young people taught this year
96
Teaching groups
Small live groups across the core curriculum
11,900+
Lessons attended
Live, teacher-led lessons your pupils showed up to
602
Subject enrolments
Pupil places across Science, Maths & English
3
Core subjects, KS2–KS4
A full academic spine, not a holding pattern
£370k+
Invested in pupils
Lancashire's commissioned provision, lifetime
RECAP · 02

A balanced academic core

Lancashire didn't commission babysitting. The provision held an even three-way split across the subjects that matter most for progression and GCSE — every pupil carried a real curriculum.

600 subject places
Science · 201 places 4,107 lessons attended
Maths · 201 places 4,107 lessons attended
English · 198 places 3,701 lessons attended

The near-perfect balance is by design: AP1 timetables every pupil into the core academic trio, so a placement keeps GCSE pathways open rather than closing them.

RECAP · 03

Where the need was — by year group

The provision flexed across nine year groups, but concentrated exactly where Lancashire's pressure sits hardest: the GCSE years and the Key Stage 3 run-up to them.

Year 10 GCSE
190
Year 9 KS3
126
Year 11 GCSE
120
Year 8 KS3
96
Year 7 KS3
27
Years 1–6 Primary / KS2
42

Enrolments by year group, 2025/26. The GCSE-heavy profile is why the academic-core model matters: these are pupils with exams on the horizon and no classroom to sit in.

THE IMPACT · 04

What the year actually changed

For this cohort — anxious, excluded, medically absent, or out of school entirely — the measure of success isn't a single attendance line. It's pupils who re-engaged, kept a curriculum, and could be handed on. On every count, the provision delivered.

382
Active placements carried into 2026
Pupils still learning with Lancashire's provision — a live, continuing service, not a closed project.
219
Pupils who moved on
Young people who completed, reintegrated or transitioned — provision that did its job and stepped back.
★ Ofsted, Oct 2025 — "meets all the minimum standards for online education"

"Staff help pupils to reignite their spark for learning in a calm and nurturing online environment."

Ofsted monitoring report, October 2025

"A significant strength is the support staff provide for pupils with SEND… each pupil receives carefully tailored, individualised teaching."

Ofsted monitoring report, October 2025

"Communication with those who commission places is a strength. Consequently, commissioners feel well-informed."

Ofsted monitoring report, October 2025

Lesson after lesson, Lancashire's pupils answered "yes" when asked if they'd enjoyed the session — the engagement signal that comes before attendance, attainment and everything after.

Purple Ruler pupil feedback, 2025/26
THE YEAR AHEAD · 05

From a proven service to a county-wide Academy

You've already built the hard part — an established, inspected, county-commissioned provision with 189 pupils on roll. The next step isn't to start something new; it's to formalise what works into a single Academy programme that's easier to run and reaches further.

The 2025/26 model

  • Pupils added one referral at a time, often outside the standard process
  • Core academic subjects only — Science, Maths, English
  • A separate price line and conversation per placement
  • Attendance and progress tracked by hand, school by school
  • No single county-level view of the whole cohort
→

The Academy programme, 2026/27

  • One commissioning route into a block of Academy places your team controls
  • A fuller offer — add PSHE, Careers & options to the academic core
  • One predictable weekly price; budget the cohort, not the pupil
  • Real-time attendance & safeguarding feeding your weekly AP procedures
  • A live county dashboard of every Lancashire pupil in provision
1

One front door

Every Lancashire referral flows through your AP team into one Academy arrangement — no more provision arranged off-process.

2

48-hour starts

A pupil identified Monday can be learning by mid-week, in an existing group — no bespoke set-up each time.

3

A fuller school day

Build out from the core trio toward a full timetable, with reintegration to mainstream as the explicit goal.

4

One report, one invoice

Attendance, safeguarding and progress in a single county view; billing consolidated to one predictable line.

THE YEAR AHEAD · 06

Provision that grows as a pupil re-engages

This is the single biggest quality change for the year ahead. Instead of one flat offer, the Academy becomes a tiered model tied to attendance — so the pupils furthest from school get a therapeutic way back in, and richer provision unlocks as engagement is rebuilt. Attendance stops being something you chase and becomes something pupils climb toward.

Below 40%
Re-engage

Therapy-first offer

For pupils too far from school for a timetable to land, the first offer is therapeutic, not academic — wellbeing, mentoring and a low-stakes route back into routine. The goal is simply to rebuild the habit of showing up.

Therapeutic re-entryMentoringLight-touch academics
40%+
Core

Full academic core

Once a pupil is attending, they carry the GCSE-facing academic spine — the same balanced core that ran all this year. For Year 11s, this is structured squarely around GCSE readiness and exam access.

EnglishMathsScienceY11 GCSE readiness
Higher
Enrich

A fuller school day

As attendance climbs, the timetable broadens toward a complete offer — the enrichment that makes provision feel like a school, not a stopgap, and that paves the way back to mainstream.

PSHECareersPECreative Studies
🧩 Therapy runs alongside every tier, added by referral — so a pupil in the academic core who needs therapeutic support gets it tagged on, without dropping their curriculum. Below the bottom threshold, that therapy is the provision until they're ready to climb.

Thresholds shown are proposed starting points (≈40% to unlock the core, higher to enrich) — final bands to be agreed with Lancashire and tied to your welfare-call trigger and case-officer model.

THE YEAR AHEAD · 07

The Academy price does more than teach

The work your team currently carries by hand — welcoming families, chasing welfare, compiling attendance — comes built into the weekly Academy price. No teaching hour lost to admin, and no separate invoice for any of it.

📞

Family welcome call

Every new pupil's family contacted at onboarding, so the placement starts on a relationship — not a login.

🛟

Welfare call at <50%

A welfare call is triggered automatically the moment a pupil's attendance drops below the 50% threshold.

📊

Weekly attendance report

Delivered every week with the outcome of each welfare call logged against the pupil — ready for your case officers.

✉️

Click-to-email parent

One click from the weekly report opens a pre-filled email to the parent — outreach without the copy-paste.

📈

Attendance & termly reports

Individual attendance reporting as standard, plus a termly progress report per pupil — with an extra report on exception only when a pupil is changing setting or returning to a school.

🧩

Therapy by referral

Therapy and enhanced mental-health support available as a clearly-tagged option, added on referral — only where a pupil needs it.

Built for your September case-officer model
Attendance dips below 50%→ Automatic welfare call→ Outcome logged→ Weekly thresholded list to the case officer→ Only urgent cases escalate to you

Designed around the model discussed for September — case officers carrying ~50 pupils each, with a clean list of true non-attenders to act on and home visits where they're needed. The provision does the chasing; your team makes the judgement calls.

THE YEAR AHEAD · 08

The models — and the rates already in place

No new pricing to negotiate. These are the tiers Lancashire is already using; the Academy line is the spine the county-wide programme is built on, with extended and full-time options as you broaden the offer.

Recommended spine

Academy

£139 / week · 15 hrs core

A full, structured online school day across core subjects. Built for pupils who need immersion and routine, with reintegration to mainstream as the goal. Extended (18 hrs, £169 — adds PSHE & Careers) and full-time (25 hrs, £199 — adds options) tiers available.

≈ £9.27 / pupil / hour · 48-hour start
Group teaching

Blueprint

£29.17 / hour · per group

Small-group teaching across core subjects on a bespoke timetable — the same price whether the group is one pupil or six. The most cost-efficient way to hold a cohort.

≈ £4.81 / pupil / hour at a full group
1:1 SEND

Compass

£29.17 / hour · 1:1

One-to-one provision shaped around an EHCP or high-level SEND need, with pastoral and specialist support built in — for the pupils who need it most.

Adapted to the pupil's plan

The efficiency case is plain: at a full Blueprint group of six, Lancashire supports a pupil with a qualified teacher and a peer group for roughly £4.81 an hour — a fraction of typical 1:1 alternative provision.

From a variable bill to a budget you set

The real cost change for 2026/27 isn't the rate — it's the shape. Moving placements onto the flat Academy line turns a bill that moved with group sizes and hours into one predictable, fully-inclusive number you can set before the year starts.

Last year's cost shape

  • Blueprint billed hourly at £29.17/hr per group — cost per pupil swung with how full each group ran
  • Hourly and fixed placements landing on different lines
  • Welcome, welfare and attendance chasing carried as your team's own staff time
  • £370k+ committed across the relationship — with invoices that bounced between school, inclusion & finance
→

Next year's cost shape

  • One flat rate — £139 per pupil per week, every pupil, every week
  • Welcome calls, welfare calls, attendance & termly reports included — no extra line
  • Budget = pupils × £139 × weeks, known on day one
  • A single consolidated invoice your finance team reconciles in one pass
🧮 Worked example (illustrative): a block of 40 Academy places across a 38-week year = 40 × £139 × 38 = £211,280 — fully inclusive, fixed, and known before September. Scale the block up or down; the per-pupil maths never changes, and the operational wraparound is already in the price.
THE YEAR AHEAD · 09

Proven at county scale

The model Lancashire is moving toward is already running elsewhere — and the numbers underwrite the decision.

The White Horse Federation runs one trust-wide inclusion hub on exactly this model — pooled places across schools, 50–60% more cost-effective than arranging provision separately. 60+ pupils; belonging treated as the intervention.

White Horse Federation — trust-wide alternative provision

"The purpose of this work is to reach the students nobody else could."

Tim James, SEND & Inclusion Lead, White Horse Federation
THE YEAR AHEAD · 10

What 2026/27 could look like for Lancashire

You finished the year with 189 pupils on a proven core. The Academy programme keeps every one of them, broadens what they're taught, and gives your team a single, predictable way to scale.

1
Commissioning route
Replacing referral-by-referral placement across the county
48hr
Referral to learning
Into an existing group — no bespoke onboarding
£139
Per pupil, per week
One flat, fully-inclusive Academy rate — the budget you set
Next step

Let's design Lancashire's year ahead.

Half an hour with your live data, a draft county-wide Academy arrangement, and a single number to budget against. You've already proven the provision works — this is about making it easier to run and bigger in reach.

📅 Book a planning session
↓