Building Better Practice

Want to improve your training provision by using the findings of inspection?

This area in the Ofsted section of the Excellence Gateway has just been completely updated to reflect the most effective practice found across Learning and Skills provision as identified by Ofsted inspections. Several new areas such as health and safety have been added.

If you have any areas that you would like to improve, take a look at the numerous short bulleted examples of things that are working for providers in improving the experience of their learners.

Below are a series of bulleted headings, covering the main areas that impact on all learners in wider further education.

• Achievement and standards
• Learning and assessment
• Support for learners
• Leadership and management
• Equality of opportunity
• Quality improvement

When you click on the headings that interest you most you will enter a further list of subheadings, with a brief explanation of what each is about, so that you know if it interests you. For example, if you were to click on equality of opportunity 13 further subheadings (complete with explanations of what they are) will be displayed. If you open any of these you will see examples of typical strengths and areas for improvement, followed by bulleted examples of particularly effective practice grouped together that apply to each subheading (covering the different Learning and Skills inspection remit such as colleges, work-based, ACL, DWP, etc and all types of learner). These brief ‘effective practice’ examples are derived from inspection findings and it does not matter whether you work in an outstanding or a satisfactory provider, there will be something here that will benefit your learners and potentially help in improving your provision.

Don’t forget to check what you do already with the series of ‘health check’ questions that will help you establish where you currently are.

You can leave feedback on the different areas to reflect how useful you have found them. Please also look at the longer Good Practice Database examples that have already helped many providers to improve their provision and don’t forget to share your knowledge of inspection-derived quality improvement with others.

….take advantage of the most effective practice found on Ofsted inspections