There have been minor amendments to the ITE inspection handbook for use from April 2019. These are:
- Table 1, page 29 – completion rates have been removed from the outcomes.
- Paragraph 119, page 30 and pages 33–36 – completion rates have been removed from areas to be considered by inspectors when evaluating programme outcomes.
- Paragraph 147, pages 45–46 – completion rates will now be considered alongside leadership and management. New wording has been inserted to ensure that inspectors focus on leaders’ evaluation of completion rates. It also explains how both recruitment and selection are improved, while ensuring providers admit prospective trainees that they are ready to train to teach rather than ready to teach at the point of admittance.
A presentation that David Storrie gave at ‘The future of teacher recruitment, training and retention conference’ can be found here.
Slide 12 of the presentation may be particularly useful along with the following information:
The key focus is that providers should ensure they recruit trainees with the capacity to teach. Ofsted want providers to accept any potential trainee with the capacity to train to be a teacher.
A change has been made to the 2019 inspection handbook whereby completion rates have been removed from the ‘quality of outcomes’ judgement. This year inspectors will consider this as part of their work with leadership and management. Inspectors will not be checking retention rates and comparing them to regional and national benchmarks; instead they will be discussing whether providers are adapting their programmes to take into account the needs of trainees, what lessons are learnt from those who have had to drop out, etc. Raw numbers will not matter.