Posted on January 20th, 2025
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Steven Wallis, Executive Director of Quality at NCG, discusses how NCG drew on the Education and Training Foundation’s (ETF’s)ÌýÌýfor the Further Education and Skills sector when recently setting the college group’s own standards.Ìý
What do ETF’s Professional Â鶹´«Ã½ mean to you, and how did you draw on them when setting standards for NCG?Ìý
The Further Education (FE) and Skills sector can feel like quite a crowded space for standards so ETF’s Professional Â鶹´«Ã½ help take us back to the fundamentals in terms of expectations for high quality teaching and leadership. The values-based Professional Â鶹´«Ã½ are particularly useful as a benchmark for us when recruiting, because if you don’t have those fundamental values and attributes, it’s difficult to build knowledge and skills upon that.Ìý
When setting our latest standards, we looked at ETF’s Professional Â鶹´«Ã½, in conjunction with Department for Education standards and others, and sought to operationalise them and focus on the essential practical elements. We created a discrete number of NCG standards for teaching and learning and for leadership, mapping ETF’s and other standards onto these. NCG’s standards are split into three areas: teaching and learning, course leadership, and curriculum leadership. These standards are now set for the next couple of years, but we will continue to evaluate and review them as we go forward.Ìý
How are NCG’s standards supporting professionalism and the building of an inclusive culture across the group?ÌýÌý
As a college group, our mission is to enable social mobility and economic prosperity through exceptional education, and our values are about being open, honest, collaborative and inclusive. We’re a very consultative organisation, with councils and communities where staff come together to share knowledge and agree policies. So a good proportion of our staff were involved in developing the new NCG standards. For us, it was really important to involve staff so that the NCG standards would outline our version of outstanding practice that is attainable day to day. To support professionalism, it’s important that all staff are given the training and resources to hit the standards, and that’s the stage of the process we’re in currently.Ìý
What would your advice be to other senior leaders in FE and Skills seeking to draw on ETF’s Professional Â鶹´«Ã½ in their standard setting and quality work?Ìý
I can only speak from our experience so far, but having consistent language as our focus for evaluation and professional development activity is definitely starting to help us move forward as one organisation. It acts as a golden thread through all seven colleges. By simplifying and making clear the standard that we are looking for, and modelling what good and outstanding looks like, we can provide assurance to our staff about what they’re working to, and what the expectation is. Ultimately, it helps us to bring everything back to the learners; our aim is to make sure that no learner across the whole organisation gets anything other than a good experience or better.ÌýÌý
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Find out more about ETF’s Professional Â鶹´«Ã½ on ourÌý.