Why carry out a School Self review?
Many schools use a range of self-review activities to find out what is working, or not, in their schools. Sometimes these are overly bureaucratic, a burden on staff at all levels and don’t always tell us what we need to know. School self-evaluation can be a fundamental force in achieving your school improvement objectives. If your school could do with some guided reflection on this, and really want to make school self-review sensible then this might be just what you need.
If you want to know how to improve your school, with children at the centre of all decisions, look no further!
Libby Povey, Assistant Principal, Park Academy West London
What are the benefits?
We need to re-think our accountability measures we use in schools – they are often a distraction on our real efforts towards school improvement – and who do we really do all this QA work for?
This INSET is designed for senior and middle leaders to help you work out the most effective self-review process your school should engage with.
Effective self-review where stakeholders feel involved, valued and empowered to be change-makers can reduce teacher workload and support improvements in wellbeing.
You may be interested in our School Improvement Review service and range of audits – for more information click here
JMC Inspection Team
What will the training look like?
The INSET will start with a brief outline of the principles for effective self-review activities and how they can be fully aligned to your school and department priorities. No review activities for the sake of review.
Leaders will take time to reflect on their existing School Development Plan (SDP) and establish what lines of enquiry self-review activities should follow and if any editions need to be made to the SDP itself.
We will then look at
- What is a ‘sensible approach’?
- What difference could this make to your school? What will be the impact? Why is it different to looking at inspection frameworks alone?
- The difference in value between monitoring and review
- How can we use the OFSTED framework to support our activity?
- What next? How will this programme be structured / options so that it is effective for your school?
- Who should take part? Which senior leaders are in charge of self review activities?
The main part of the INSET will then be to review existing review activities your teams carry out and evaluate if they are fully aligned to school improvement priorities and if they are effective, using a SWOT analysis. We will look at what other evidence might need to be collected.
The final part will be to construct a detailed School Self-review schedule which can be shared with all stakeholders so that all activities are transparent, and which will itself become a powerful tool to inform the Whole School SEF.
Has your school, academy or PRU already been visited by Ofsted & placed into a category such as serious weaknesses or special measures?
We can support you in putting together an action plan / submission to the DfE, as well as carrying out an external review or monitoring visit . Find out more here
JMC Post Ofsted Support Team
One Reply to “INSET: Conducting a school self-review for Ofsted”
Comments are closed.