We’re revising how we’ll inspect education and training from 2024 and beyond. Our ambition is to improve the quality of education and training for children, young people and lifelong learners.
This page was updated on 20/05/2024
Publication date
About the changes
We have consulted with individuals and organisations in the youth services, schools and PRUs, post-16 (further education, adult learning in the community and independent specialist colleges), Welsh for adults and local government education services sectors.
The findings can be found towards the bottom of this page.
Our approach
Involve
- Over the past eighteen months we have engaged widely with all our stakeholders and partners to make sure their views are built into how we approach inspection from 2024.
- We wanted to hear everyone’s ideas about our early proposals, which look different in different sectors.
Listen
- We value and listen carefully to the views of everyone involved in education – from senior leaders and principals, to teachers, lecturers, classrooms assistants, parents, learners and the wider community.
Trial & review
- We tested slightly different approaches to inspection with a few providers across each sector. Feedback from these trials continues to inform the next stage of development.
- We use this feedback to review what and how we inspect to make sure our work keeps pace with changes in Wales and meets the needs of the next generation of learners.
What will guide the new approach?
- In Wales we have a national mission to improve education and training for all learners, where all partners involved in education improvement have a key role to play.
- Learners will continue to be our priority. Everything we do has their best interests at heart.
- The new arrangements are more focused on the most important areas that drive improvement.
- Our arrangements will be manageable for all providers and complement their own processes of evaluation and improvement. We have explored a wider variety of inspection activities to better support improvement across individual providers and sectors. This includes how we tailor activity in individual provider inspections, thematic inspections and a range of other visits.
- We’ll have more regular contact with schools and other providers, offering more up-to-date feedback for parents and carers.
- Part of our aim is to bring external inspection and providers’ internal evaluation processes closer together. Better alignment of these processes will better support improvement.
- We’ll continue to use our resources where they are needed most, such as with settings that need support and monitoring for improvement.
Consultation responses
Thank you for your ongoing engagement to develop our new inspection arrangements.
We were pleased that so many of you took the time to respond to our consultations to date and indicate support for the approaches, as well as sharing lots of great ideas to feed into the next stage of development.
Below you will find the results of the consultations undertaken to date.
Post 16 education and training sectors
We are grateful to those who contributed to our recent consultation on our proposals in the further education, adult learning in the community and independent specialist colleges sectors.
We are pleased to share the findings from our recent consultation.
Welsh for Adults (WfA) - Consultation Results
We are grateful to those who contributed to our recent consultation in the Welsh for Adults sector. The findings of our consultation can be found here.
Consultation Results – Local Government Education Services (LGES)
We are grateful to those who contributed to our recent consultation across Local Government Education Services (LGES).
We are pleased to share the findings from our consultation below.
Schools and PRUs consultation responses
We have taken a gradual approach to the development of inspection in Schools and PRUs, introducing a number of changes to the inspection framework through a twelve month trial. Further pilots have been carried out to thoroughly test any changes.
Youth work inspections - consultation response
Our inspection approach will be bespoke to the youth work sector. We have developed a model that can be applied both to youth work being delivered by local authorities but also separately to voluntary sector organisations delivering youth work, where appropriate. We’ll co-design and deliver inspection with the sector and through engagement with young people accessing youth work before piloting during this year.
Part of Inspection