Curriculum Focus for OfSTED

Amanda Spielman, OfSTED’s Chief Inspector, has made it clear that there should be a significant shift from focusing on outcomes for learners to a more rounded curriculum. This is an important shift in inspection focus as it moves away from merely looking at exam or test results to actually what is being delivered to learners.

Curriculum Outcomes Assessment

This new focus means that education and training providers will need to identify curriculum outcomes which will be used as their delivery planning tool and then will need to demonstrate how the outcomes have been achieved. This is something that we have developed in Stedfast to allow education and training providers to plan and assess their programme delivery. Each programme is broken down into course objectives and outcomes. Users are able to identify the outcomes that they want learners to achieve and then review their performance against them. The outcomes do not necessarily have to be learning outcomes. They could also be experiential and development outcomes too.

Once the objectives and outcomes have been developed the administrator can then assign the assessment plan to a team of staff, can create measures for each outcome and add supporting documents which can support reviewers in their judgments.

Measuring performance

Each outcome has a measure that allows staff to judge performance. Outcomes can have multiple measures. Perhaps it will be measured by a test, project, portfolio, presentation or exam. To judge whether or not outcomes are being achieved, the measure should state the expected outcome, what you will use to measure the outcome, what your overall success measure is, the impact that this measure will have on the overall delivery and understanding of learners, when within the programme the outcome should be measured and which member of staff is responsible for reviewing this outcome and measure.

Outcomes Review and Action Plan

Once the assessment plan has been set to live then each member of this review team will have measures that they will need to review. They can display the outcome details, the measure details and then add their findings. Once findings have been added the reviewer can also add any new actions to the review action plan.