The aim of this two-part framework is to assist staff working in educational psychology services to develop and implement a systematic approach to self-evaluation. Part 1 sets out the quality assurance model and provides illustrative examples of very good and weak aspects of provision. Part 2 is a toolkit and provides detailed practical assistance and advice on the process of self-evaluation at service and individual practioner level. Both documents focus on the role of self-evaluation in developing a service’s capacity to drive continuous improvement and, most importantly, to demonstrate measurable improvement in the quality of stakeholder experience. The clear focus is on impact and outcomes.
The framework materials are also provided as an online resource. This will assist educational psychology services in amending or augmenting the materials to suit local needs, priorities and circumstances. Services’ approaches to self-evaluation will build on existing good practice.
The framework also includes the performance and quality indicators, measures and themes which will provide an external basis for the inspection of educational psychology services as part of the INEA. Each educational psychology service will be able, through its own self-evaluation arrangements, to gather management information and evidence that enable it to judge the effectiveness of its performance against six high-level questions, which will also form the basis for inspection by HMIE. These are:
Each of these high-level questions can be answered by evaluating the quality of the service across ten Key Areas. At the centre of this framework are key performance outcomes and the impact provision is having on service users, the community and staff. Inputs, such as leadership and management, support the effectiveness of the key processes and together help us to arrive at an overall evaluation of the council’s capacity for improvement. The framework is summarised in figure 1 on the next page.
This framework aims to provide support for educational psychology services in carrying out the process of self-evaluation through which they can:
The use of performance and quality indicators, for both self-evaluation and external inspection, promotes consistency. Although these two processes may differ in terms of purpose and audience, their language and basis should be the same, enabling open and honest dialogue and consistency across different evaluations.
Figure 1: Over-arching framework