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The Chief Inspector’s Annual Report - a new approach
In our role as inspectors, we have the privilege of visiting and engaging with education providers across the country. This allows us to develop a national perspective on what is happening in education and training in Wales and every year we reflect our findings in the Chief Inspector’s Annual Report.
We know from our engagement with stakeholders and from the findings of ‘A Learning Inspectorate’, that the Annual Report is valued by stakeholders as a credible source of evidence on the strengths and areas for improvement in education and training. We are also aware that we could make these findings more accessible and useful to stakeholders.
Below, we look at some of the ways we will improve how we share the information contained within our annual report. We want to deliver timely and relevant messages that offer value to the education sector and can drive improvements.
Timely and relevant
To ensure that our messages are as up to date as possible, this year there will be two phases to the publication of our Annual Report findings.
As a first phase, we will share our interim findings at an early stage in the autumn term. These will be brief summaries of the key messages from our engagement and inspection activity. They will provide stakeholders with a clear and timely picture of what is working well and what needs improving across each sector and across the wider education landscape in Wales.
In January, as a second phase, we will publish the full Annual Report. This will build on the interim findings and be a more detailed report describing the ‘state of play’ of education and training in Wales and indicating ways forward.
Increasing engagement
We know that the Annual Report and its messages are valued by education professionals in Wales. We also recognise the pressures facing people working in education and that these can make it difficult to fully engage with a lengthy document. We want to ensure that the Annual Report is easily accessible and useful to the people who are at the centre of driving improvements in education: leaders, practitioners and learners. To help with this, this year we will:
- Ensure that the full Annual Report contains greater use of infographics and summaries. We will provide an ‘on the page’ summary for each sector and for key themes, such as The Curriculum for Wales and additional learning needs reform.
- Trial the use of professional learning resources to encourage discussion around some of our key findings. Where we identify specific areas of provision that need improvement, we will develop materials for staff to use in their settings to aid discussion and reflection. These will provide staff with prompts to help inform the provider’s self-evaluation and point to key areas of effective practice that we have identified in our inspection and engagement work.
- Develop ways to engage learners. We know from our work with providers that where learners have a meaningful input into self-evaluation this is a powerful tool to assist improvement planning. Building on the use of learner resources in our Peer-on-Peer Sexual Harassment thematic, we will trial providing resources for settings to engage learners with self-evaluation around aspects of the Annual Report’s key findings.
Sharing our messages
We already use a variety of methods to share messages from the Annual Report, including updates on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as well as through blogs, our website and via email. We are considering developing further ways of increasing engagement over coming years, such as:
- Holding an in-person launch event. This could include a ‘round table discussion’ with the Chief Inspector and other inspectors as well as representatives from the wider education sector.
- Arranging a Facebook Live event to allow stakeholders an opportunity to communicate directly with the Chief Inspector and other inspectors about the annual report, its messages and implications.
- Producing podcasts that focus on key findings in the report. These would involve inspectors and other education professionals and feature discussions that explore ways of addressing the challenges highlighted in the report.
Have your say
We are keen to find out what you think about these developments and to hear your ideas about other ways that we can make the information included in our annual report more relevant and useful to you. Below you will find a link to a Smart Survey where you can record your thoughts. The survey is open until 8th July 2022.
https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/AdroddiadBlynyddolAnnualReport/
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