I’ve worked on somewhere in excess of 4500 SARs and it’s still one of my favourite areas of work. I wrote my first self-assessment report at the end of my first teaching year back in 1987-88, not because anyone asked us to, but because we knew we weren’t doing it right and so wanted to know how to improve. Ever since then, I’ve considered self assessment to be one of the most creative parts of our day job. When I […]

On Thursday, September 16th, my open training session will be on the CCQI RED System. This is a replacement for traditional accountability-style observation processes and it’s without doubt the most powerful and transformational training we do. Just as with children, quality improvement professionals shouldn’t have favourite providers, but I’m afraid I do. East Coast College suffered the wrath of inspectors for 20 years – can you imagine what that must have felt like? Constantly being told by the Big O […]

Would anyone like to make a small (or large!) contribution to a quick-n-dirty research project please? Years ago, when I was on the Board of the LSIS Excellence Gateway, I worked with a metadata specialist and a taxonomist (and many, many specialist staff and inspectors from every corner of FE & Skills) to produce the sector’s first Taxonomy of Issues. This was a list of every possible issue in the FE & Skills sector. It was then used to create […]

What do you think of this line in the Ofsted Education Inspection Framework: “Leaders understand the limitations of assessment and do not use it in a way that creates unnecessary burdens for staff or learners.” My own feeling is that this is symptomatic of a very poor understanding of assessment, and comes from that well-worn, but misleading phrase: Teaching, Learning & Assessment. When you think carefully about the implied chronology of TLA, it says: we teach, they learn, and then […]

My favourite time of year is upon us again – the beginning of the ‘extended induction period’. I remember inspecting a work-based learning provider in London and asking about the way they created a learning culture at the start of learners’ programmes. The head of quality said: ‘Ah, we used to run a two-week induction, but when we surveyed learners they told us it was too long. So we reduced it to one week. We recently surveyed learners again, but […]