| Part One: Evaluating the Care and Welfare of Residential Pupils | ||
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PART 1
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| How are we doing? | ||
Self-evaluation in CWRP involves asking questions like:
('Residence' should be interpreted throughout the document to mean boarding house, unit or hostel). It involves:
The experience of schools in using 'How good is our school?' suggests that the stimulus to take a Closer Look often comes from issues identified during the Broad View. It is important to involve all staff at the earliest opportunity in the Broad View and so foster an ethos of 'know thyself' throughout the residence. In this way, quality assurance is not seen as just an extra - it becomes part of everyday thinking and planning. |
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| How do we know? | ||
The
15 indicators listed in the performance indicators (PIs) grid in Part 3 and features of
good practice in Part 4, provide you with a framework for answering this question. The
indicators are grouped under the 4 Key Areas referred to above:
The PIs which describe the themes and features of good practice, provide a starting point as you move to create a culture of self-evaluation and self-improvement (for further advice on how to use performance indicators consult 'How good is our school?'). At the same time, using the PIs will help you to prepare an evaluative account of the quality of CWRP for your key stakeholders. Your judgements can be evaluated against the four levels of performance which are an integral part of each PI. The four, which are used also by HMI in inspections, are: |
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| Level 4 | very good | major strengths |
| Level 3 | good | strengths outweigh weaknesses |
| Level 2 | fair | some important weaknesses |
| Level 1 | unsatisfactory | major weaknesses |
| This
will give you the advantage of applying the same set of performance criteria that HMI and
others use in the external evaluation of CWRP. The use of national criteria, based on a
broad consensus, encourages consistency and provides a common language for discussing the
quality of CWRP throughout Scotland. It also opens the way for schools and hostels to
produce their own self-evaluation report on CWRP for parents, pupils and the wider school
community. The key questions and features of good practice in Part 4 can be used at all stages of evaluation. They are intended to 'flesh out' the PIs through practical illustration. The features are not comprehensive: they cannot be applied exactly to all the very different contexts of residential care and welfare across Scotland. For example, staff supervision ratios and the nature of accommodation will necessarily be different between establishments catering for pupils with special needs and mainstream boarding schools. |
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| What are we going to do now? | ||
Drawing
on your answers to the first two questions gathered through the Broad View
and Closer Look, you should be on the way to a clearer awareness of your
current levels of performance in CWRP. For example, you will be able to:
In deciding what to do now, and selecting priorities for action, you will wish to consider the residence's aims and development plan (see 'The Role of School Development Plans on Managing School Effectiveness', Second Edition, SOED, 1994) which should be an integral part of the overall school plan. You are in a position of strength - as a personal stakeholder, you are ideally placed to undertake realistic development planning based on your self-evaluation. Most people move on from the findings of the Broad View and Closer Look to identify in their development plan those priorities which need to be addressed right away. One of the lessons learned from schools which have embraced self-evaluation is that it is wise to home in on a few priorities in the development plan. You will not be alone in adopting a 'manageable approach' based on priorities. Rather than try to do everything all at once, it is better to demonstrate success - in other words 'to put the puck in the net' as is said in Canadian schools. |
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