OfSTED - Staff Development Planning
We are all waiting with expectation for the release of the new OfSTED inspection framework, which is currently in consultation and is expected to be used from September 2019. One of the areas that providers will need to consider in the Leadership and Management judgement is how well they manage staff performance.
OfSTED – Staff Development Planning
Education and training providers have always had to demonstrate to OfSTED that they manage staff performance. In the new framework, the wording has changed slightly to:
the alignment of continuing professional development for teachers and staff with the curriculum, and the extent to which it develops teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge over time, so that they deliver better teaching for learners
To be outstanding in this area, education and training providers will need to meet the following criteria:
Leaders ensure that teachers receive focused and highly effective professional development. Teachers’ subject, vocational, technical, pedagogical and pedagogical content knowledge builds and develops consistently over time and improves the quality of education provided to learners.
Stedfast – Staff Performance Management
We have developed a staff performance management and CPD module in Stedfast to allow providers to manage staff performance easily. What we have done is to enable staff performance to be aligned with professional standards and CPD activities.
In the first instance, users of Stedfast will need to add the professional standards that they want staff to be able to demonstrate. These can be either set internally or imported from professional bodies. Once these have been added, users can add job types and assign professional standards to them.
Setting Staff Objectives
Each member of staff needs to have performance objectives that they work towards. Each of the objectives is then aligned with professional standards and CPD activities. CPD activities can be added in two ways in Stedfast; either requested by a staff member or by a line manager.
We have just updated Stedfast so that line managers can import previous performance outcomes – this is useful if staff consistently work to set objectives over an extended period of time.
For each objective, the line manager, in line with organisational policy, can set the period of time between reviews. At the allotted time, the line manager and staff member can then meet and discuss performance against each objective. An achievement percentage can be added as well as comments by the reviewer and reviewer.
This will start to help organisations demonstrate how staff are developed over a period of time. We have also added a report demonstrating how many professional standards have been covered by objectives.
How does this help prepare for OfSTED?
Staff development is one of the key areas that OfSTED inspectors will look at. They want to see clear CPD and development plans that must be up-to-date and purposeful. By aligning performance objectives to professional standards, organisations are able to implement identifiable benchmarks that staff need to work towards.
Using Stedfast, organisations can easily manage their staff performance and CPD activities. The new CPD tools that have been added make managing CPD much simpler, with staff being able to request activities for approval and line managers being able to add events for their staff.
