The ten dimensions of excellence give you some idea of your destination, of what you are aiming for.
The next thing to consider is how you are going to get from where you are now to where you want to be.
When we visited schools and early education centres, we did not just ask people what dimensions of excellence they had focused on. We also asked them how they had got to where they are now and how they were planning the next stage of their journey.
Part 1 of this guide, Aiming for Excellence, describes the concept of excellence, the nature of the learning process and what we mean by successful learning. It also shows in diagrammatic form what the ten dimensions of excellence are and how they relate to each other.
Part 2, Exploring Excellence, looks in more detail at each of the ten dimensions. It focuses on specific features of each dimension which have been identified by research and inspection as key contributory factors in helping children and young people to learn and to achieve success. Many of the features deal with ways of interesting and involving the people in your school — children, staff, parents and partners — and gaining their commitment.
In Part 3 of the guide, How good are we now?, which is the next version of How good is our school?, we include the tools, or sets of indicators, to help you find out exactly where you are and plan your journey to where you wish to be. Schools are not alone in seeking excellence. There are others too — education officers, youth workers, social workers and so on — with differing starting points and perspectives, but aiming for the same destination. All use similar sets of tools to work out where they are, tools which have been developed within the same quality framework but contextualised to reflect the specific aspects of the work they do.
If your school still has a lot of work to do to become an effective school, you might focus firstly on using the quality indicators in Part 3, How good are we now? to identify areas of strength and weakness in the education your school provides so that you can concentrate on improving specific aspects. You can then use Part 2 Exploring Excellence to take you forward, and Part 5 to provide ideas of the kinds of things other schools have done to improve their practice.
Part 4, Planning for Excellence, describes the kinds of preparations which you will need to make, how to choose and plan your route and how to check on how you are getting on.
The audio-visual resource, Journeys to Excellence, which is Part 5 of this guide, provides examples of changes and improvements which people have made before you. Some people may already have reached excellence in some dimensions. Most will be part way there. They can recommend some good routes to follow and point out some of the challenges. These examples are, if you like, ‘rough guides’ to excellence. The resource looks at how change has happened in the schools we visited. It considers aspects like building a collaborative culture, dealing with complexity and diversity, developing a community of learners, making use of knowledge, learning from disagreement and making connections among things which do not appear to be coherent.
How good are we now?
An important stage in any journey is to plot your starting point.
The framework of quality indicators and performance measures included in Part 3 of this resource, How good are we now?, provides a complete set of tools for evaluating the key outcomes of your school and the extent to which it is meeting the needs of its stakeholders: children and young people, parents and families, the staff who work in and with the school, and the community it serves. You can use these indicators to answer six key questions about your school, questions which are also used by other organisations to evaluate their work. The questions provide a common framework for evaluation shared by all staff who provide services for children. The six questions are:
And finally
The framework of indicators is designed to be used diagnostically to help you identify those factors which have led to significant strengths or weaknesses in outcomes and impact in your school. These contributory factors may relate to the quality of education your school provides, how effectively it is managed or how well it is led. It could relate to all of these factors.
The same framework of indicators is already being used to evaluate other parts of the education system, for example, the quality of community learning and development and the quality of education services within the council as a whole. This means that centrally deployed officers may draw on evaluations arrived at in your school or neighbourhood to make judgements about the quality of education services within the council as a whole.
Exploring excellence
If you have decided that you are ready to move from ‘good’ to ‘great’ in your pursuit of excellence, you can focus on Part 2 Exploring Excellence. The dimensions presented in Part 2 address some key aspects of the quality indicators in Part 3, those aspects which we know are significant drivers for achieving excellence in learning and success for all. They do not include everything which goes on in a school. Instead they focus on the key activities and relationships which lead to effective learning. They cover issues such as:
Exploring Excellence is designed for flexible use. You may decide to focus on developing excellence through your partnerships with agencies, or through enabling young people, staff or parents to undertake more significant roles in shaping the school. It is your choice which route you take, which dimensions you focus on and the order you follow. You do not need to look at all the dimensions. You could, for instance, focus on the features relating to health and well-being, as part of your work towards becoming a health promoting school. You might want to improve your partnership with parents, and focus on that dimension. The most important thing is that focusing on any of the dimensions of excellence should lead to improvements in learning and in successful outcomes for young people — in particular, the outcomes of A Curriculum for Excellence — because the dimensions are all inter-related.
Exploring Excellence looks at each dimension in turn, focusing on some key features of each. Some features and sub-features are more appropriate to school settings than to early education, or to day as opposed to residential settings, so you may need to select those which are most relevant for the children with whom you work. You can go into the detail of the features identified as much or as little as is useful for the stage of development which your school has reached. For each dimension, we have given some examples of the kinds of things we see in establishments with particularly strong practice, together with quotations from young people, staff and others involved in schools up and down the country.
In order to chart your journey from good to excellent, we have described the kinds of features that we tend to see in schools which are providing good quality in terms of each of the dimensions. Much of what you will see here may be quite familiar. You will probably be able to recognise features of your own school. We have also provided descriptions of what the same features and sub-features might look like in an excellent school. The challenge is to travel from the left hand to the right hand side of the page.
A school is good to the extent that… |
A school is excellent to the extent that… |
For each feature there are descriptions of the kinds of effective practice that we tend to see in schools which are providing good quality in terms of the features identified for a particular dimension. |
For each feature there are descriptions of what practice looks like in schools which demonstrate excellence in relation to the same features. These descriptions include and build on those in the left hand column, but without repeating them. |
This box contains quotations from young people, parents and staff. |
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As you go further on your journey towards excellence, taking your practice from good to very good and from very good to excellent, you will start to see more frequent and observable signs of the impact of what you do on the experience of key people in your school, in particular, of course, on the learning of children and young people.
Exploring Excellence does not provide a recipe for achieving excellence or a checklist to determine when you have got there. What the charts do is to demonstrate the differences between practice which is fairly typical of good quality and practice which is associated with excellence. Unlike quality indicators, which focus on the balance between strengths and weaknesses in order to arrive at a judgement on a six-point scale, the content of the charts is expressed in terms of strengths only. The charts provide positive targets to aim for. They complement the descriptors within quality indicators which represent a level of performance. The challenge they offer will take you further in your journey towards excellence.
How you get from one side of the chart to the other, or which of the dimensions you tackle first is up to you. Part 5, Journeys to Excellence, will give you some idea of what other schools have done to develop excellent practice. By ‘ visiting’ another school in this way, you can arrive at a view as to what is the best route for your own.