Delivering Outcomes Based Quality Assurance

As we enter a new year it is always a good time to reflect on the quality assurance of our courses and programmes. To accommodate this we have released a new feature in Stedfast that allows organisations to use outcomes as a basis for their quality assurance.

How outcomes-based quality assurance works

Excellent education and training providers will already be using some form of outcomes to manage their delivery and quality assurance. Outcomes or objectives are added to strategic planning documents. If providers don’t have strategic planning documents then they are likely to fall foul during an OfSTED inspection. Strategic planning documents will help set out the vision and plans for the organisation and the objectives and outcomes will set out the targets that need to be achieved.

The problem is that these documents, like many others created by education and training providers, is that they are created in isolation and are not aligned to quality or compliance frameworks that they are working to.

What do we mean?

If you are subject to an OfSTED inspection then your key quality and compliance driver should be the Common Inspection Framework. Organisations will use this as the basis for their self-assessment report and quality improvement plan. The problem is this, like other documents, is often written in isolation – it is a stand-alone document that might refer to other planning documents but actually, it is not aligned.

The new outcomes feature in Stedfast allows organisations to create their strategic planning documents and then develop an outcomes set which set out the objectives and outcomes that need to be achieved. These outcomes are then mapped to quality and compliance frameworks such as the Common Inspection Framework. The result is that organisation can effectively track which CIF judgments have been covered in other strategies.

Setting up outcomes-based quality assurance

This is very simple in Stedfast. The system administrator is able to create an outcome set. They then identify objectives and outcomes which apply to the strategy. Each outcome can also have a specific target added to it and each outcome can also be mapped to another outcome set or top-level framework such as the Common Inspection Framework.

The actual strategic document can then be created in Stedfast with the outcome set attached to. Organisations can then view the main framework and see which outcomes are mapped to it.

What about reviewing the strategy?

Of course, it is then important to review the strategy and using Stedfast this can be done as a collaborative process. Those reviewing the strategy can comment and score each outcome and objective and if they choose to do so can also identify strengths and areas for improvement that can then be added to the organisation’s development plan.

Online Demo

We are sure you are interested in seeing more so please contact us and we will run an online demo for you and walk you through the features.