TDA SELF-EVALUATION DOCUMENT (SED)

NOTES OF GUIDANCE FOR PROVIDERS OF INITIAL TEACHER TRAINING (ITT) (Penultimate version, July 2008)

Throughout this document the main paragraph numbers match those in the SED and are aligned with the criterion in the Ofsted Framework. To help you use this document the sub paragraphs are numbered using Roman numerals. These do not correspond to the SED sub paragraph numbering.

  1. Introduction

(i) The SED is primarily a tool for your use. It should help you to demonstrate how well you evaluate the effectiveness of your provision. The Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) will request a copy of your SED annually. The TDA will use the SED as part of its strategy for supporting providers. The SED will then be made available to Ofsted to help inspectors to plan their inspections.

(ii) Throughout the document there are requests for data to be supplied as annexes. It is envisaged that you will already be producing much or all of this qualitative and/or quantitative data. The TDA will give providers a data profile to assist with their evaluation and review. The 2007/08 SED should be received by the TDA by December 1 in 2008

(iii) TheSED asks you to provide evaluations for both your primary and secondary provision. You may wish to complete separate SEDs for each of these phases. It is likely that much of the evaluation in separate primary and secondary SEDs will be common to both.

(iv) If you have a graduate training programme (GTP) in addition to other provision, you must complete a separate SED for the GTP, combining your evaluations of both primary and secondary provision where this applies.

(v) You may not have data for the three-year period suggested, in which case you should submit your most recent data and begin the process of compiling a year-on-year data bank so that trends can be considered in future SEDs. The SED is predicated on data being available to support and justify your evaluations, particularly data on selection and on trainees’ outcomes. Without such data evaluations are likely to be little more than assertions.

(vi) The data are requested as annexes to the SED so that you can submit them in formats convenient to you, such as spreadsheets you have already compiled. You must ensure that any data submitted links directly to the evaluations made in the body of the SED. You must not submit generalised data that cannot be linked directly to evaluations made.

For instance, you should not submit all the data held on individual trainees since this level of detail is unlikely to support your evaluations directly.

Similarly, you should not provide a breakdown of trainees’ attainment against the Standards in each secondary subject, unless there is an evaluative reference to significant differences between the subjects.

(vii) If you wish to refer to other materials, such as course reviews, you must specify the relevant pages in those documents rather than simply supplying their titles or annexing them in entirety.

(viii) The length of the SED will vary according to the complexity of your provision. The most complex providers with multiple routes, for example, may write a SED of up to 50 pages, but it is expected that most SEDs will be much shorter that this. You may use bullet points if you prefer, rather than continuous prose.

  1. Context

(i) This section and section 3 below are the only sections of the SED which do not require evaluative comments. This section is not the place to make judgements about quality, nor is it a summary of the other sections of the SED. You should try to set the scene for the evaluations which follow and refer to the features of your provision which make it distinctive. You do not need to refer to all of the given prompts if you feel that they are inappropriate.

For instance, location could affect your provision if your geographical setting creates issues for trainees in travelling to schools or meeting with each other.

In the same way, local needs could affect your provision if there is an acute shortage of teachers in particular subjects/phases. Regional needs could affect provision if the high cost of housing prevents teachers taking up posts in the region, leading to providers focusing their recruitment on potential trainees already living in the region.

The prompt that refers to “distinctive features” is asking you to identify features of your provision that are distinctly different from that routinely offered by other providers. For instance, your training may depend largely on distance learning materials.

(ii) You should feel free to add other information if it would help you to describe the context in which the training takes place more clearly. You need to be aware that if you identify important contextual features, you must evaluate in the main body of the SED how they affect your provision.

(iii) You should limit this section to the most important contextual factors affecting your provision. It is envisaged that this section will be around300-800 words. Providers with complex provision may wish to write more but should restrict their commentary strictly to statements of fact.

  1. Main Priorities for Improvement for ITT

(i) As with section 2 above, this section is not asking for evaluative comments. You are asked to record the main priorities you worked on over the year of the SED, arising from previous self-evaluation or as stages in longer term development planning. Your response to these priorities must be evaluated in the main body of the SED. The priorities you identified should have fed in to the improvement planning process and resulted in action plans. The relationship between the SED and improvement planning is illustrated in the diagram below for the academic year 2007/08. Once submitted, the SED cannot be changed, but improvement planning and action plans will allow you to show how you are responding to the new priorities identified and how you are making adjustments to provision over the course of the academic year before producing the next year’s SED.

Figure 1: SED and improvement planning for academic year 2007/08

Priorities from the 2006/07 self-evaluation noted in Section 3 of SED for 2007/08 / Around July 2007

Improvement planning process for 2007/08 begins, leading to Action Plan(s) : who, what, when resources, timeframes, how to monitor and evaluate. / From July 2007 through the academic year 2007/08
 / 
Implementation of action plan(s): monitoring, evaluating, gathering data, amending provision. Beginning the process of compiling the SED for 2007/08

Completing SED after final assessment; evaluation and impact of above – and identifying new priorities for 2008/09 / July 2008 – November 2008
 / 
SED submitted to TDA / By December 1 2008
  1. Compliance Check

It is obviously crucial that all provision meets the Secretary of State’s Requirements for ITT (updated 2007). Each provider should establish systems for making the necessary checks. While several people may have some responsibility for the checking procedures, the SED is asking you to identify the position of a senior manager who has overall responsibility for ensuring that the compliance checks have been carried out effectively. The SED does not ask you to put in the name of this person, but he/she should be recognisable from the position.

  1. Attainment: trainees’ standards

(i) In Section 5 you are asked to provide data about trainees’ attainment for the year of the SED (Year 3) and the previous two years (Years 1 and 2). Although you may supply data on post-graduate and undergraduate courses, or different subjects in the relevant annex, where it is needed to support your evaluative commentary,the overall Standards grade for each of primary and secondary phases should be based on all trainees being trained and assessed against the Standards in that phase. For undergraduate courses, assessment data to support the grade should be only that for trainees in their final year.

(ii) It is recognised that some providers, particularly EBITTs, will not initially have this data for three years. Providers are not expected to compile the data retrospectively. They should provide the data for the year of the SED and begin the process of compiling the data annually. Data for GTP provision should not include other employment based routes, such as OTTP and RTP

(iii) Drawing on the data you submit, you are asked to provide an evaluative commentary about trainees’ achievements over time, and/or differences between different groups of trainees.

For instance, your data may show that the number of trainees attaining grade 1 has increased year on year. Your evaluative commentary should identify the factors contributing to this.

Another example may be that trainees in one secondary subject attain lower grades overall than trainees in other subjects. Again, your evaluative commentary should try to identify why this might be and what has been done about it.

Data on the attainment of primary trainees may show that grades have been maintained over the three year period. The evaluative commentary may highlight that this has been achieved, despite significant changes that affect the training. For instance, there may have been a number of new schools added to the partnership; the trainee population may have changed because of the widening participation agenda; or there have been developments to existing provision, such as the introduction of primary modern foreign languages or another specialism.

Any of the above might have an impact on how you evaluate any of the other sections in the SED.

(v) The relevant Ofsted inspection guidance will provide grade criteriaand guidance to help you determine the Standards grades. Your procedures for internal and external moderation should enable you to be confident that your judgements are consistent with those made by other providers.

(vi) If you do not assess trainees using the Ofsted four-point scale you should submit evidence of their attainment in your preferred form, but you must justify your overall conclusions in a way that will allow comparisons with the attainment of trainees elsewhere.

For instance, if you use a five point scale to grade and assess your trainees you will need to consider how this corresponds to the Ofsted grade criteria and grade scale.

If you assess your trainees only as pass/fail, you must consider how you can demonstrate any improvement in trainees’ attainment over time, since much of the evaluation required later in the SED should be linked to the effects of training on trainees’ attainment.

(vii) The positions suggested for paragraph 5.4 are those of senior managers who have responsibility for the reliability of the assessment procedures.

(viii) In Section 5, you must refer to evidence from external moderation relating to the accuracy and reliability of your assessments of trainees. You should show how you have responded to any recommendations.

  1. Recruitment and Selection

(i)In Section 6 you should evaluate the quality of your selection criteria and the effectiveness of your procedures, focusing on the cohort(s) of trainees on which the SED is based (Y3 figure 5.2). It is assumed that the information you collect about trainees at the selection stage will feed in to the various review/assessment points throughout the course. For undergraduate courses, selection will not have taken place in the year of the SED and review/assessment points will take place over a much longer period. For all courses, information gained at review/assessment points should be used to evaluate the appropriateness of selection criteria and the effectiveness of selection procedures, as shown in the diagram below:

Figure 2

Selection  Review point 1  Review point(s)  Final Assessment Criteria &

Procedures

The kinds of questions you should consider are:

  1. Do the selection criteria reflect the qualities trainees need to meet the Standards at a good level?
  2. Where providers offer more than one route, do the selection criteria reflect the different demands of each route?

For instance, as a small GTP course, some subjects may have only one trainee. Do the selection criteria test the ability of such trainees to work independently of others and make good progress?

  1. Do the selection criteria reflect any distinctive features of your provision?

For instance, in Section 2 of the SED you may have indicated that a distinctive feature of your training is that training incorporates a significant amount of distance learning. Do trainees need any particular skills or qualities to undertake this form of training and are these reflected in your selection criteria?

  1. Does the information gained on individuals at the selection stage feed in to training?

For instance, do you inform subject mentors and tutors about the background, strengths, areas of relative weakness and qualifications of trainees?

  1. Do you use the information gained about trainees’ progress at the review/assessment points to evaluate the appropriateness of selection criteria and the effectiveness of selection procedures?

For instance, if a trainee is not making the progress expected, this may be because of:

Personal problems;

Training has been relatively unsuccessful;

The selection criteria/procedures have not discriminated sufficiently in identifying trainees suited to your provision, or to a course of ITT.

The last item in this list is particularly important when courses are oversubscribed and many potential trainees have been rejected.

(ii) The data requested in 6.3of the SED should support your evaluation of the selection criteria and the selection procedures in recruiting trainees who complete the course(s), meet the Standards at a good level and gain employment.

(iii) The final prompt in 6.3 assumes that data about teacher retention over a three year period will eventually be made available. Until that time, larger providers may wish to follow through a sample of trainees to gain the information requested.

(iv) It is recognised that small secondary providers will not necessarily need to analyse data by subjects, but will analyse data for the cohort as a whole. However, in their evaluation they may wish to refer to any differences between subjects.

  1. Training and Assessment

(v) In this section you are asked to evaluate the quality of training and assessment over a three year period in relation to the impact these have on trainees’ outcomes. The third year of evaluations should provide data for the year of the SED (Year 3).

(vi) In response to paragraph 6.5 you should provide summary data showing trainees’ and trainers’ evaluations of the quality of training.

For instance, you may provide a table showing the proportion of trainees in each year who rated the training as very good, good, satisfactory or unsatisfactory. This may need to be broken down into subjects and routes if there are significant differences between them. Supporting information and/or more detailed data, must therefore be available for inspectors should they ask for it.

(vii) In response to paragraph 7.2 you should evaluate the quality of the training in relation to the data provided on trainees’ outcomes in Sections 5, 6 and 7.

For instance, the second prompt in 7.2 asks you to show how well yourtraining enables trainees to meet the QTS standards. You should draw primarily on the data on trainees’ attainment in5.1 and 5.2 and the evaluations of the quality of training and assessment in 7.1, to show how your training has enabled trainees to fulfil their potential (as identified through selection and tracking across the course).

(viii) It is recognised that some providers will not have the data for the previous three years. They should provide data for the year of the SED and begin the process of compiling data annually.

  1. The effective and efficient use of resources

(i) This section is not asking you to provide any breakdown of finances and how they are allocated. Rather it is asking you to consider how you make decisions about the allocation of resources and how you monitor the impact such decisions have on the quality of training and outcomes for trainees. You may find it helpful to refer to case studies to exemplify your decision making and monitoring processes here.

(ii) Please note that the term “resources” is used to refer to human as well as material resources.

  1. The quality of provision across the partnership(s).

(i) This section asks you to evaluate how well you manage and monitor the quality of the training provision, and how you ensure accurate, reliable and consistent assessments of trainees’ achievements across the partnership(s).