Vision-impaired mode: on | off
Excellence Gateway
This case study was produced by JISC RSC (Regional Support Centres) West Midlands on behalf of the Excellence Gateway
Sector relevance: Further education colleges
Keywords: Improving institutional effectiveness, actions and outcomes, evidence gathering, judgement and reporting, management and training, policies and procedures
Stafford College undertook a free self-assessment of its learning resource centre using a toolkit developed by the Council for Learning Resources in Colleges (Colric) and the FE and HE group of Cilip (CoFHE). The tool provided a way of evaluating quality of service and served as a useful benchmarking exercise.
Stafford College offers vocational and general courses from foundation to higher education level for 16-18 year-olds and adult learners. Based solely in the town centre, the College has excellent facilities including industry standard recording studios, a new sports hall and a first class arts centre.
Lynda Turner, LIS Manager at the College wanted a way of measuring the success and effectiveness of the learning resources centre. Aware of an already-developed tool for Scottish colleges, Lynda first learnt of the English college equivalent at a joint West Midland/East Midlands RSC event. She jumped at the chance to use the free toolkit in consultation with the JISC Regional Support Centre (RSC) West Midlands.
Lynda says:
“We wanted something to confirm that we were on the right lines in terms of the way we assess our service. The learning resource centre operates within the college-wide Self-Assessment Review (SAR) guidelines but we wanted to know if we were identifying our strengths and weaknesses in the correct way. There was a definite need for such a tool, as prior to the introduction of this toolkit, there were few guidelines for practitioners as to what constitutes a high quality learning resources provision.”
In October 2008, the College carried out the assessment using the toolkit with help from the Learning Resources Adviser from the RSC. The toolkit maps learning resources quality indicators to the Ofsted common inspection framework, and is a good way of benchmarking a learning resource centre or library service. It is based around the five key questions asked by Ofsted inspectors:
Using these key questions as prompts, the toolkit gives performance indicators, and suggestions as to where staff could find possible supporting evidence. Each section includes a grade illustration to outline how the service should mark themselves.
With guidance from the RSC, Lynda and key staff from the learning resource centre completed the assessment. Most of the key questions they were able to complete successfully, however KQ1 ‘How well do learners achieve' proved a little more difficult. The question has five sub questions including ‘how does the LRS support basic skills provision?' and ‘how does the LRS measure its impact on learner achievement?' At Stafford, basic skills is not directly supported by the LRS and they find it very difficult to quantify how the LRS measures impact on learner achievement. Currently, Lynda finds that they approach key questions one and three in very similar ways and often cited the same evidence for each question.
The toolkit approaches KQ1 self-assessment more in terms of national agendas and key performance indicators, whereas Stafford College's Library and Information Services SAR tends to look at more quantitative measures such as how many PCs are available per student and how often each student uses the learning resource centre.
“We tend to look at more measurable things like how many resources are available. The toolkit has been useful as it has shown us that we will need to approach KQ1 in a different way, for example, think about how we can prove that we are supporting national agendas such as Every Child Matters.”
Prior to the introduction of the toolkit, benchmarking was against the CofHE survey of college libraries and learning resource centres but this only takes place every three to four years and focuses primarily on quantitative data from a national perspective, rather than qualitative information from an individual learning provider.
“The toolkit is the first thing that encompasses everything. It was a really useful exercise for us and the more providers that take advantage of it, the better. We need some way of benchmarking ourselves against other colleges and it also helps raise the profile of library services within the College.”
As a result of the toolkit, Lynda has consulted with the College's quality manager to establish how learning resources can incorporate the outcomes of the toolkit into the current self-assessment report.
She adds:
“The toolkit is not designed to replace your existing SAR but it's a great exercise for identifying strengths and weaknesses in learning resources as part of your annual self-assessment process. I would definitely recommend other colleges to do it, even if it's just for confirmation that you are on the right lines with your existing self-assessment.
We already had a Quality Improvement Plan in place before carrying out this review. Our main objective now is to think in more depth about key question one of the toolkit. We want to do a lot more research, and establish how we can prove that we are supporting national agendas and in turn, how we can improve the grading we gave ourselves. It would be good to speak to other colleagues to find out how they tackled the question - by networking and sharing practice, we can hopefully get some ideas which is partly what the toolkit is all about.”
TIP: Have you rated how useful this case study is? Use the star-rating facility, which features in the grey bar that runs across the top of every page of this site. (To rate a case study, or any page in the Excellence Gateway, you need to log in to the site first.)
Disclaimer: The Regional Support Centres (RSC) and the Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) support the development of educational e-learning. We may refer to specific products, processes or services. Such references are examples and are not endorsements or recommendations and should not be used for product endorsement purposes.
You can find this page and download any referenced resources from the Excellence Gateway at http://excellence.org.uk/192897.
