Quality and Accountability

The Association of Colleges (AoC) is supportive of the direction of travel Ofsted has taken with the new Education Inspection Framework. We agree that it is of utmost importance to place more emphasis on the substance of education and what matters most to students and teachers alike.

The EIF consultation outcome slides summarise the changes to inspection in moving from the common inspection framework to the education inspection framework and the case for change. AoC’s response to this consultation can be found here. Ofsted’s consultation outcome summary provides a full response and illustrates the extent to which the inspectorate has listened to the sector during the framework's development.

The key changes to the framework are as follows:

• A new quality of education judgment – focussing on curriculum intent, implementation and impact
• The removal of the outcomes judgement
• The separation of behaviours and attitudes (exhibited by students) and personal development judgements (the activities a college provides to develop students outside of their academic or technical discipline)
• The simplification of provision types - education programmes for young people, apprenticeships, high needs provision and adult learning programmes
• The introduction of the deep dive methodology, which you can learn more about here.

The following resources help set out how inspection will operate from September 2019:

• The EIF further education and skills inspection handbook sets out in detail how we will inspect and the criteria inspectors will use in arriving at judgements
• The education inspection framework (EIF) provides the overarching approach
• These summaries provide the research background to the EIF
• This webinar is useful for middle managers and nominees. This webinar provides a good introduction to the deep dive methodology
• This webinar is useful for governors and includes a section on sub-contracting.

The following data set provides an interactive overview of the college sector performance in terms of Ofsted grades, in comparison to other inspection remits:

Reports:

We are running an online workshop Education Inspection Framework event on 9 December 2020 which will provide a deeper understanding of how the EIF key judgment requirements can be used to shape robust and effective quality frameworks. Colleges can also access in-house support on the topic. Contact us here for more information.