The new interactive Raising Standards Guides
The Raising Standards Guides, produced by the DfES Skills for Life Strategy Unit, have now been made available as interactive versions, on CD and on the Internet. Each of the 13 guides in the series deals with a different context of learning as follows.
A Contextual Guide to Support Success in Literacy, Numeracy and ESOL Provision in:
- Adult and Community Learning
- E-learning
- Embedded Learning
- Family Learning
- Further Education Colleges
- The Juvenile Secure Estate for Young People Aged 15-17
- Jobcentre Plus Programmes
- Learners with Learning Difficulties and/or Disabilities
- Offenders Supervised in the Community by the National Probation Service
- Prisons
- Voluntary and Community Sector
- Work-based Learning
- Young Offender Institutions for Young People Aged 18-21
The guides are intended to help practitioners and managers improve the quality of teaching and managing Skills for Life provision by using the five Common Inspection Framework questions for their particular context.
Until now, the Raising Standards Guides have been available only as hard-copy documents, or as downloadable pdfs. This website is now making available updated and interactive versions of the guides, with many new features intended to make the guides more adaptable to users' needs.
Mindful of the new focus on self-assessment, the opportunity has been taken to update the guides with new material. The introduction includes revised information on the policy background for each context of learning, and the case studies have been updated.
How the interactive Raising Standards Guides work
From the start, the aim was to create guides that were not just context-specific, but also dynamic, in that they move from the general principles of the Common Inspection Framework to the practical application for quality improvement in Skills for Life in a range of different contexts.
For this reason, the guides illustrate a process, or movement, from the Common Inspection Framework, through specific, proven actions for improvement, to the recognition of success in self-assessment and, ultimately, inspection grades. It means providers can see a direct connection between the key questions in the Common Inspection Framework to their implementation 'on the ground' and the subsequent evidence of improvement in self-assessment and inspection grades.
The interactive versions are particularly well suited to this treatment of quality improvement as a process. The flowchart shows how the process works across each guide. We encourage providers to follow a similar route as they use the interactive guides to improve their practice.
INTRODUCTION TO THE CONTEXT
The revised introduction sets out the policy background for each context of learning.
CHECKPOINTS FOR THE COMMON INSPECTION FRAMEWORK
The five questions of the Common Inspection Framework (CIF) are broken them down into a series of 'checkpoints'.
Clicking on a checkpoint will open suggestions for what each CIF question means in your context.
A: HOW TO ACHIEVE SUCCESS
Now you know what each CIF question means in your context, how can you make the changes that will meet the requirements of each question in your context?
The sections headed 'How to achieve success' for each CIF question offer expert advice on how you can achieve success in each of the five areas covered by the CIF. These sections include sample materials, which you can download, save or print.
B: WHAT IS SUCCESS?
How do you know you have succeeded? In the next section, we look at what success might look like in your context through a series of case studies.
The case studies are again positioned under each of the five questions of the Common Inspection Framework, so you always know what aspect of provision they are illustrating.
C: HOW IS SUCCESS RECOGNISED?
Finally, we look at how success is recognised and reported on at inspection in your context.
We have taken quotes from inspection reports that illustrate good practice in each of the five areas covered by the Common Inspection Framework. In many cases, you can link to the full report to find out more.
New features
Putting the DfES Raising Standards Guides onto the Internet has opened up the opportunity to exploit still further the range and depth of information they contain. Some of the new features include:
- updated information on the policy context in the introduction to each guide
- lateral links between the guides, so that one aspect can be examined across all the guides - for example, to compare leadership and management across all 13 contexts of learning
- checkpoints for each Common Inspection Framework question all together in one place, with the option to view the implications of each checkpoint for a particular context
- downloadable examples of individual learning plans, schemes of work and mission statements - actual documents used by teachers and managers
- revised and updated case studies, many with links to web resources
- quotations from recent inspection reports illustrating good practice, with links to the full report
- the ability to save individual pages or sections in an e-notebook for reading or printing later
- a comprehensive interactive glossary with over 500 entries that link directly to further resources and information
- search facilities
- links to a wide range of paper-based and web resources, through a comprehensive resource bank
- a focus throughout the guides on how the Government's Skills and Skills for Life strategies relate to a specific context and how to interpret this in practice
- better potential for updating and supplementing the guides as more material becomes available.
