Using Grade Descriptors in Stedfast

Anyone undertaking an OfSTED self-assessment report and quality improvement plan will know how difficult it is to grade judgements. That’s why we created a feature in Stedfast to allow users to add a scoring matrix to ensure that grading is more realistic to performance.

For anyone who has had to create a self-assessment report and quality improvement plan, they will know that the report needs to reflect the areas and judgements in the OfSTED Further education and skills inspection Handbook.

Each area of the handbook needs to be covered, as well as any specific provision type. These include:

• Overall effectiveness

• The effectiveness of leadership and management

• Quality of teaching, learning and assessment

• Personal development, behaviour and welfare

• Outcomes for learners

Usefully, OfSTED has published grade descriptors for each area which should be used when grading judgements. Stedfast users can add a grading/marking scheme to each assessment plan. A scoring matrix is added to each outcome to determine the specific criteria for that particular grade. This helps to make the grading of the self-assessment report more realistic. Although Stedfast can never control grade inflation because the individual determines that, it does provide clearer guidance for the user on how to grade findings for that particular outcome.

For self-assessment reports, the OfSTED inspection judgements become outcomes which are then assessed. Users create measures and targets for each outcome (judgement), and then findings are added for each of these. Stedfast will then aggregate the grades for the key areas.

Once a Self Assessment Report has been completed, it can be easily downloaded to a PDF report to be submitted to OfSTED.