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Gateway to FE college quality guidance and support |
LinksQuality Improvement Agency (QIA)The Learning and Skills Council home of targets and standards for the FE sector The office for Standards in Education with responsibility for FE inspections 16-18. The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education with responsibility for all HE inspections. The inspectorate for education and training in Wales. Office
for National Statistics. The S4S site provides a host of support services for quality managers including an excellent series of quality packs. The Association of Colleges provides leadership to the FE sector and offers a collective voice in relation to national developments. Also home of the Beacon Awards for best practice.
The home of the new sector skills councils which are gradually replacing all national training organisations.
The new home of standards for teaching and learning for the Post 16 sector The home of professional standards and quality guidance for the FE sector.
The GCSE and A-Level performance tables are published each November. You may search by LEA and by individual school or college. The Equal Opportunities Commission provides guidance on all aspects of gender equality. The Commission for Racial Equality provides guidance on all aspects of race awareness. The Disability Rights Commission provides advice and guidance on the implementation of best practice standards for the disabled in FE colleges. Home of standards for good employment and staff development practice Chartermark is the government's national standard for customer service for public service organisations. Home of the Business Excellence quality standards mark and its updated quality programme, Investors in Excellence. |
Quality standardsRe-organisation of DfES On 28th June 2007 the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) was reorganised into two separate departments - one to focus on schools and one to focus on the FE and HE sector. The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) is under the direction of Secretary of State Ed Balls and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) is under the direction of Secretary of State John Denham. Vision 2020 and Developing a Vision: personalising FE are two major reports available on the DCSF website. The former highlights the skills agenda and the movement towards the 'knowledge Age' highlighted by the Final Leitch report 2006 and the 2006 White Paper. Essentially by 2020 the British economy will demand a much more highly skilled labour force as more and more unskilled employment transfers to the low wage economies of the Far East and the Indian sub continent. A child starting school in 2007 will be aged 18 in 2020 and will need a curriculum rich in skills development. The latter report is a related consultation paper for the FE sector on how best to carry forward personalisation. An overview circular is available for download in the downloads section of this website -see link on homepage. In addition the Expert Learning course in London in November develops practical responses to these changes. See homepage. The Quality Improvement Agency has a brief to co-ordinate all aspects of quality and improvement guidance in the FE sector. It will build in particular on the activities of LSDA and the Standards Unit to deliver a sharp quality focus on the best practice in teaching and learning. The QIA is led by Chief Executive Andrew Thomson. The QIA is currently building and expanding a good practice database with clear examples to stimulate improvements across all aspects of FE provision. The Learning and Skills Council has published its new annual statement, Raising our Game and published commitments to the expansion of apprenticeships for adults, 12 new national skills academies and a goal of 90% of 17 year olds in education or training by 2015. Ofsted have merged with ALI to form a single inspectorate for the FE sector and are fast moving forward into the new light touch inspection regime. The Ofsted website contains an overview report of further refinements to light touch inspections from September 2007. The last Chief Inspector's annual report ( October 2006) was disappointing for its lack of any depth of findings. In particular Ofsted are no longer publishing any lesson observation data because the new inspection system involves so few lesson observations that any data would be unreliable. Consequently Colleges should continue to benchmark against the last full set of data in the Chief Inspector's report 2005. The key improvement issues raised by Ofsted are best summarised in the Ofsted reports,'Why colleges succeed' and 'Why colleges fail' published November 2004. Both reports are available for download from the OFSTED website and provide a clear overview of OFSTED findings. The S4S website provides practical help and guidance on all aspects of FE quality management. Their quality packs are well regarded but also well hidden! To find them select 'Information and Guidance from the menu and then click on the publications tab followed by Quality Packs and download what you need. All free, simply need to register! S4S also supports a very useful online quality forum for FE quality managers to exchange advice, swap materials and good practice. To join go to Quality Forum. Lifelong Learning UK has completed a full consultation programme and published a new set of standards to govern teacher training courses in FE. The new standards may be downloaded from the Lifelong Learning UK website and come into force from September 2007 The Sector Skills Development Agency (SSDA) is the governing body for all new sector skills councils. The DFES Achievement and Attainment tables were formerly referred to as Performance Tables and prior to that unofficially as League Tables. They remain controversial because they provide raw comparisons of exam performances by students in very different schools and very different localities. Value added systems are currently being developed. However, the Performance Tables do provide a useful overview of the performance of different LEAs against the national average and provide a starting point for colleges to analyse their catchment areas. Inspire Learning has more often been referred to as the national leadership college. However, it is not a college but a service to promote and offer training to the highest possible standards in effective college leadership. It also provides information and guidance on many related aspects of management good practice. The Association of College Managers (ACM) has published an excellent support pack for high standards of leadership and management in Further Education. The Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) provides a national focal point for the promotion of gender equality. The key issue for young men is underachievement. Young women not only outperform boys at GCSE but also A-Level and they are now also achieving more first class and 2.1 degrees at university. The key issue for young women is ongoing stereotypical course choices and later career choices e.g. 90% of health and care enrolments are female whereas 96% of engineering enrolments are male. The impact in later life is lower pay for women. Full statistics and associated information are available from the EOC. All colleges should have responded to the July 2003 ammendment regulation to the Race Relations Act 1976 and put in place a Race Equality policy. The policy should not be filed away but should be an active tool for the elimination of racial discrimination and the promotion of positive race relations. All colleges should have smart targets to combat direct and indirect racial discrimination. However, note that only five FE principals and only 2% of FE managers are from minority ethnic backgrounds. The Disabilty Discrimination Act 1995 was ammended in 2003 to place a statutory duty on all public organisations including FE colleges to have full and open access to all services. There are 6.8 million registered disabled people in the UK and of these 10% or around 659,000 are in the 16-24 age-group. Colleges need not just to review physical access but also marketing and support to attract and promote better qualification and employment opportunities for the disabled. Most colleges seek some form of external assurance of quality practice in relation to staff management, customer service and procedures. The Investors in People, Chartermark and Business Excellence marks are widely established as guarantees of robust quality standards. Finally, if you have reached the bottom of this page and the link you are looking for isn't here then please let us know and we will add. However, note that some quality related links will be found on the Curriculum page and pages linked to Curriculum like ICT and Adult and Community Learning. |
