THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE QUALITY FRAMEWORK OF INDICATORS AND THE TEN DIMENSIONS IN PART 2 OF THE JOURNEY TO EXCELLENCE.
The framework of indicators in this edition of The Child at the Centre provides a set of tools to help you to evaluate the quality of education in your centre. The indicators cover the full range of a centre’s work and are designed to help you to identify strengths and priorities for improvement which you can build into your improvement plan. Over the years, staff have become accustomed to using indicators in this way to help them to manage the process of continuous improvement. A centre will always need to know how well it is doing across the full range of its work, and the indicators will help you to do this.
Each of the dimensions of excellence in Part 2 of The Journey to Excellence is associated with one of the key areas in which the indicators in The Child at the Centre are organised. The dimensions can help a centre to move forward on those aspects of work where it judges that it is ready to go from good, or very good, to great. They can help to make real changes to those aspects which are at the heart of what a centre is about – learning and success for all. The dimensions are not audit tools. They do not cover everything which goes on in a centre. They only look at those aspects which have a direct impact on learning and outcomes for all young people. They are levers for transformational change, moving straight into the activities and practices which are associated with excellence. The dimensions and their related features give ideas of some of the things which can make a centre an excellent centre.
How and when you use the dimensions will depend on the stage the centre has reached on its journey to excellence and the kinds of improvements which are necessary. It will also depend on features of its capacity for improvement, that is, how well prepared the centre is for making the kinds of changes which can transform the lives of its children. These would include:
Planning for Excellence, part 4 of How good is our school?: The Journey to Excellence looks in more detail at the various ways in which your centre can engage in developing its vision and values, its approaches to self-evaluation and planning for improvement so that you can tailor the approach to meet the needs of your centre.