VIEWS & OPINION
Uncomplicated success: the roadmap to effective quality improvement planning
Comment by LOUISE DOYLE, CEO at quality assurance specialist Mesma
button and considering ‘so what?’ can be beneficial in flushing out the desired impact. Which area for improvement drove the action? How can it help us to improve outcomes? Respond to stakeholder feedback? What data would you use to demonstrate achievement of the objective has had a positive impact?
• Bottom up, top down approach
Evaluation needs to be driven by individuals, teams and departments, rather than written at an organisational level before being cascaded down to junior members of the team. When writing the improvement plan, it makes sense to do the opposite - identify key strategic themes for improvement and allow departmental teams to populate the specific actions as relevant to them. The rationale for this is to avoid improvement plans becoming overly tactical and while such actions may be necessarily operationally, you are looking for people to focus attention where the impact will be most felt. A recent Ofsted report states: ‘Leaders and managers have implemented well thought-out improvement strategies, which they have applied rigorously to rapidly improve the quality of the provision’.
• Short and sweet is key
The quality improvement plan is a cornerstone of quality practices and it’s one key area of quality assurance that schools and FE providers have in common. Too often developing one is more complicated than it needs to be. Keeping things simple, clear, and precise is the key to successfully writing and implementing your plan but that’s an easy thing to say and in practice it can be hard to do. The reason why we focus on clarity and simplicity so much at Mesma is that we see too many improvement plans that are too long and lacking in the focus they need to be effective. As we approach the end of the academic year, many of us will turn our attention to refreshing our quality improvement plans for the year. The preparation and planning for this are essential. So, how do you go about developing and implementing an effective quality improvement plan?
• Keep it clear
It might seem obvious but when you’re knee deep in the detail, the relationship between self-evaluation and improvement planning can lack clarity. Evaluation provides the baseline from which to improve i.e., this is where we are now and this is how we know that. The improvement plan builds on this by stating where we need to get to and how we’ll know we’re making progress and, eventually, know when the destination has been reached. Again, it sounds simple, but when this isn’t gelling as much as it ought to, you can expect Ofsted to jump on it during an inspection…‘the self-assessment report is inaccurate. It has underestimated the impact of weaknesses in teaching, learning and assessment. Consequently, leaders and managers have not set effective actions for improvement.’
• Measurable actions
It can be unclear sometimes what the measurable impact an activity is designed to have. If this is the case, hitting the reset
September 2023
The principle of a focused plan remains important. In our experience, the longer and more complex the plan, the harder it is to survive first contact, identify impact and the greater the chance it simply ends up as a paper exercise. It becomes too time consuming to review in detail and becomes a job in its own right to update. This links to the previous point: what organisational priorities need to be identified via the self-assessment process? What activities - because you don’t have time to do them all - will have the greatest impact on delivering meaningful change? I often challenge providers to stick to around ten quality improvement priorities as this is a manageable number for most.
• Who’s accountable?
It can be too easy to allocate a whole department or multiple people specific actions. So, avoid this and generate clarity by assigning individuals against improvement plan themes and activities. This will help to prevent tasks falling between the cracks as well as ensure a clear link between organisational improvement and individual performance objectives and targets - the proverbial golden thread.
When improvement planning is done well, we see judgments like this in an inspection report: ‘Action planning for improvement has been very effective. All staff must take responsibility for ensuring that they carry out improvements promptly and that learners’ benefit from the impact of these actions. Leader have correctly identified almost all strengths and areas for improvement.’
Brevity and clarity are critical to writing a good plan. Consider also that when you are inspected, the Ofsted team has only a short time to assess and review you. So, a simple, more holistic approach will pay dividends when it comes to effective evaluation and improvement planning.
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