Quality Assurance of Alternative Provision

I'm sharing lessons from my work in alternative provision, quality assurance and the inclusion, exclusion agenda. If you are also reviewing your authority's use of alternative provision in with the SEND Review (March 2022) and new Ofsted inspection framework, I hope this might be a useful starting point for discussion.

A Vision for Alternative Provision

A useful starting point is to consider, what is the authority's vision for alternative provision? Where does this sit in the context of wider educational provision and specialist SEND provision? Is there an explicit and published vision statement? If not, it would be helpful to draw one up, which may come from a nicely collaborative, coproduced exercise involving all stakeholders.

Think about the policy context too, which has seen an increased scrutiny of how schools and local authorities use and quality assure alternative provision since the publication of the Green Paper, SEND Review: right support, right place, right time. What policies exist around special educational needs, inclusion, alternative provision and its commissioning, and the development of local inclusion plans?

Quality standards for Alternative Provision

Define your quality standards. Consider how many are manageable, and whether to theme them or leave them as a sequential series. Identify your stakeholders. Explore your engagement activity.

Themes for quality standards might include -

• Assessment & Understanding
• Engagement & Relationship Building
• Attainment & Progress
• The Learning Environment
• Reintegration
• Longer Term Opportunities

Quality Assurance Audit Tool

Your quality standards now lead nicely into the production of an audit tool where the standard statements become a set of questions, all with a yes/no response, with an added commentary which could be based around, what's going well, what are we worried about, what needs to change.

The yes/no responses, rather than permitting responses such as, 'in progress' (everyone says everything is in progress anyway so that answer is never helpful) aids the population of a database, which, with a bit of clever coding, can become a dynamic database. Every audit completed can be entered into the dynamic database which, very soon, will begin to show trends and themes emerging, against the individual quality standards or in relation to individual Alternative Providers.

Your audit tool document should gather information about the Alternative Provision you are auditing, who is leading the audit and who is involved which may be representatives from education, health & social care, along with basic information about dates, whether the AP is registered or unregistered and so on.

Audit Methodology

Now you need to decide what methodology you are using to carry out quality assurance audits. You have an audit tool and set of quality standards. What other information do you want to gather? If you are carrying out site visits, do you have a set of guidance for these? The audit methodology should set out what you are doing consistently to carry out the QA audits

For instance

• Quality standards
• Joint site visits
• Gathering of key policy documents
• Meetings with AP service/setting leaders
• Discussions with young people attending the AP
• Feedback from schools and parents or carers

Engagement with Alternative Provision Settings

Engagement with the business owners of Alternative Provisions is a crucial part of relationship building and partnership working. The audit is not an attempt to catch someone off guard, or spring a surprise audit on them because of concerns about poor outcomes. It should always be part of a planned series of audit activity that is communicated clearly to all stakeholders, and ideally, published on the local authority website in some accessible place.

As a minimum level of engagement you may want to share -

1. The date of an intended QA audit of an Alternative Provision
2. A request for consent for the audit to be carried out
3. Notice of what is required of the AP to enable the audit to go ahead
4. A request to visit the site with at least 2 weeks' notice of the visit
5. A request for any policy documents you want to see in advance of the audit
6. A clear plan for sharing the audit outcomes after the audit with the Alternative Provider
7. A clear communications strategy for sharing the monthly QA audit outcomes with schools, other settings and the parent-carer community.

Annual Quality Assurance Audit Schedule

As you're developing a list of Alternative Providers directly commissioned by schools or by the authority, a priority list of those for whom quality assurance audits are needed sooner, rather than later, will emerge. Set out your priority list and decide your time commitment, across each responsible team, and then plan your schedule.

If your capacity is to QA audit 2 Alternative Providers a month, that is at best, 18 QA audits in a typical local authority year. Then you need to decide when are you revisiting the QA audit. These need to be factored into the schedule too.

In setting out your quality assurance audit schedule, which lends itself to an excel or equivalent document, refer back to your audit methodology.

Include in the audit schedule all the routine activity that is part of your quality assurance. So, site visits will feature and should be scheduled, located around 2 weeks ahead of each audit round. Gathering of policy documents or other evidence will feature, and may come in perhaps one month ahead of the audit.

The annual audit schedule, colour coded because it makes it easier to locate the sequence of each type of audit activity, will soon become a dynamic document charting a myriad activities, week by week, that make up your commitment to quality assurance of alternative provision

Theming of Quality Assurance Audits

It makes life easier if you group quality assurance audits of Alternative Provision so that those involved in the audits can become familiar with that type of provision. Here are categories i have used in QA audit schedules and in drawing up an approved directory of Alternative Provision.

Ofsted registered Alternative Provision

Unregistered part time Alternative Provision

Online or hybrid Alternative Provision

A residential Alternative Provision offer

The Quality Assurance Framework

Now that you're beginning to gather a lot of separate documents around quality assurance, you can bring these together in the Quality Assurance Framework. Important elements to include, I would recommend, are the following:

• The local context
• The regional and national context
• The impact of the global pandemic Covid-19
• The impact of the cost of living crisis (or whatever language you choose to use to reflect an appreciation of the impact of economic challenges on children & families)
• Definition of Alternative Provision
• The local authority's vision for Alternative Provision
• Commissioning Responsibilities

Now you can move into the substance of the QA framework by bringing together all those strands that make up the whole - the quality standards, audit tool, annual audit schedule and so on.

Quality Assurance Frameworks do not need to be long, lengthy documents, but they do need to contain detail and to set out clearly, what is happening with regards all the elements I've referenced. In setting out the local context, it's good to have some comparative data tracking back over 3 years, as a guide, to show progress or otherwise towards the over-arching strategic goals, some of which may be in a state of transition.

I hope you've found this brief guide helpful. Please do add a comment, or get in touch directly if you want to find out how I could support your authority.