Inspecting for the future (2024–2030)

Share this page

We’re revising how we’ll inspect education and training from 2024 and beyond. Our ambition is to improve the quality of education and training for children, young people and lifelong learners.
This page was updated on 07/03/2024
Publication date

About the changes

We have consulted with individuals and organisations in the youth services, schools and PRU, post-16 (further education, adult learning in the community and independent specialist colleges), Welsh for adults and local government education services sectors.

The findings can be found towards the bottom of this page.

Our approach

Involve

  • This year we’ll engage widely with all our stakeholders and partners to make sure their views are built into how we approach inspection from 2024.
  • We will want to hear everyone’s ideas about our early proposals, which could look different in different sectors.


Listen

  • We value and will listen carefully to the views of everyone involved in education – from senior leaders and principals, to teachers, lecturers, classrooms assistants, parents, learners and the wider community.


Trial & review
 

  • Soon, we will begin to test slightly different approaches to inspection with a few providers across each sector. Feedback from these trials will inform the next stage of development.
  • We are reviewing what and how we inspect to make sure our work keeps pace with changes in Wales and meets the needs of the next generation of learners.
     

What will guide the new approach?

  • In Wales we have a national mission to improve education and training for all learners, where all partners involved in education improvement have a key role to play.
  • Learners will continue to be our priority. Everything we do has their best interests at heart.
  • The new arrangements will be leaner and more focused on the most important areas that drive improvement.
  • Our arrangements will be manageable for all providers and complement their own processes of evaluation and improvement. 
  • We’ll explore a wider variety of inspection activities to better support improvement across individual providers and sectors. This will include how we tailor activity in individual provider inspections, thematic inspections and a range of other visits.
  • We’ll have more regular contact with schools and other providers, offering more up-to-date feedback for parents and carers.
  • Part of our aim is to bring external inspection and providers’ internal evaluation processes closer together. Better alignment of these processes will better support improvement.
  • We’ll use our resources where they are needed most, such as with settings that need support and monitoring for improvement.

How can education professionals and parents feed into the review process?

  • In summer term 2023 we’ll share a survey to capture the thoughts and insight from a range of stakeholders which will feed into our plans as we decide on our new arrangements for inspection.

Consultation responses

Thank you for your ongoing engagement to develop our new inspection arrangements.

We were pleased that so many of you took the time to respond to our consultations to date and indicate support for the approaches, as well as sharing lots of great ideas to feed into the next stage of development.

Below you will find the results of the consultations undertaken to date. We will add further responses as we consult with more sectors.

Post 16 education and training sectors

We are evolving our post-16 inspection models. We are grateful to those who contributed to our recent consultation on our proposals in the further education, adult Learning in the community and independent specialist colleges sectors.

We are pleased to share the findings from our recent consultation which will inform our thinking ahead of us piloting our proposed arrangements later this year.

Welsh for Adults (WfA) - Consultation Results

As we develop our arrangements for 2024 we have proposed a suite of inspection activities with the aim of driving improvement in the Welsh for Adults sector. We are grateful to those who contributed to our recent consultation. The findings of our consultation can be found here which will play a key part in informing our next steps.

Consultation Results – Local Government Education Services (LGES)

We are evolving our Local government education services (LGES) inspection model. We are grateful to those who contributed to our recent consultation.

We are pleased to share the findings from our recent consultation which will inform our thinking ahead of us piloting our proposed arrangements later this year.

Schools and PRUs consultation responses

We are taking a gradual approach to the development of inspection in Schools and PRUs and have already made a number of changes to the inspection framework which have been trialled over the past twelve months. Further pilots will begin after the October half term.

Youth work inspections - consultation response

Our inspection approach will be bespoke to the youth work sector. We plan to develop a model that can be applied both to youth work being delivered by local authorities but also separately to voluntary sector organisations delivering youth work, where appropriate. We’ll co-design and deliver inspection with the sector and through engagement with young people accessing youth work before piloting during this year.

Part of Inspection