Middle Leader unsure if you are fully prepared for an inspection?

Preparing for an inspection isn’t easy, there’s a lot to pull together and plan. Everyone knows inspections require late nights and early mornings. If you’re a middle leader then they also include (potentially) a face to face meeting with the inspection team.

Meeting the inspectors

These meetings will require you to answer a series of questions from the unassuming “what do you see as the schools strengths?” to more obviously probing questions like “What’s performance of higher attaining students (HAs) in your subject area like?”.

To impress in these meetings and come out of the room feeling like you did your school proud you need to have done your homework and go in prepared.

To aide that preparation I’ve produced a crib sheet for my fellow middle leaders and am sharing it as a free download to support others preparing for an inspection. Use it as it is, add to it, delete rows/columns as appropriate to your, your school and your position.

Click to open document

Part One

Strengths – Section one covers the strengths of your department and school and the impacts/evidence of these on learners. Secondly this section encourages you to enter areas to improve, the actions you’re taking and the intended or emerging impacts of these actions.

Part One – Strengths

Part two

Data – Section two covers the difficult bit, data and gives you a structure into which you can drop the latest data your department has captured (we call them data drops at my school).

The aim is to give you the headline figures for High, Middle, Low attainers and Pupil Premium students at your finger tips in the meeting. It’s grouped into percentages – those above target, on target, or below. This should give you clear facts you can highlight to the inspection team. Meaning you come across as your best you, with facts and figures to back up your actions.

Part two – Data

Part three

Teaching and Learning – This final section gives you a table you can complete with an up to date review of your team. Bare in mind at this point the inspectors will have been in lessons and know t equality of teaching, so when you go in with this section completed be honest about the strengths and weaknesses of your team and what you’re doing to improve them if need be.

Part three – Teaching and Learning

I hope the document helps middle leaders (like myself).

NEW – 5Min Plan based on this document! (click to download pdf and print A4 or A3)

Feel free to share your thoughts or amendments!

Good luck!

Paul

Published by Paul

Teacher | Author | Lead Practitioner View all posts by Paul