Inspection Consultancy

Taking place at your school or another setting of your choice, our experienced consultants can provide a bespoke professional development (CPD) day focused on inspection. Below, you will find a list of our most enquired about and booked CPD days based on inspection in primary schools. To view other areas our consultants have run CPD days on or to learn more about our general INSET/ consultancy options, please click here.

 

Inspection and Self-Evaluation

We know how much school leaders value support around inspection and self-evaluation. Focus Education has been supporting schools in this way for 25 years. Like all our work, we tailor our approach to fit your needs.

Could include ...

Pre-inspection

·        Testing out your self-evaluation and checking it is robust

·        Recognising what inspectors mean by their buzzwords of achieve, belong and thrive

·        Working with you to check your data and self-evaluation tell the same story

·        Checking that the quality of provision matches your self-evaluation

·        Validating the judgement you have made against the criteria

·        Giving you peace of mind

·        Checking that you have the evidence to back up your self-evaluation judgements

·        Testing the inspection tool of ‘A day in the life of…’ when inspectors follow a specific number of children over the course of the inspection (usually would involve vulnerable children)

Post-inspection

·        Working with you to take the report further into manageable actions

·        Creating a bespoke action plan with you

·        Evaluating the impact of an action on school improvement

Self-evaluation

& review

·        Leading a school review (in partnership with the leadership team)

·        Carrying out a completely external review

·        Evaluating the impact of school improvement work

·        Focusing on a specific area and producing a report, e.g., early years, disadvantaged children, children with SEND, the impact of EAL provision

Training

·        Training for the entire staff or staff groups on managing the inspection process to ensure the best outcomes for your school

 

 

Headteacher Inspection Training (3-Day)

This three-day course will equip primary school leaders with the knowledge to enable you to prepare your school or academy for inspection from November 2025 onwards. 
By attending this training, senior leaders in primary age range schools will gain an understanding of the new framework, toolkit, report card, and training undertaken by inspectors, which will enable you to plan for and manage an inspection within your setting. 
(Note: If leaders of special schools wish to attend, just let us know and the course leader will include additional specific information relevant to special school inspection.)

Learn how inspectors evaluate the evidence to secure a judgement, looking in-depth at:

  • Each section of the new report card
  • How evidence is gathered
  • Implications for leaders at all levels to ensure they are best prepared

Over the three days, you will gain an understanding of:

  • the ‘big picture’ of the new inspection framework and the implications for self-evaluation
  • feedback from the pilot inspections
  • The key messages from inspector training on how to implement the new framework in schools
  • How evidence will be evaluated by inspectors to inform the report card
  • The role of leaders, including governors, in the inspection process

 

Self-Evaluation

We know it can be challenging for school and academy leaders to ensure that all school team members understand the need for rigorous self-evaluation. However, we also know this is essential for a school or academy to be successful. Here are examples of training input we can provide.

  • How good is your school, and how do you know?
  • Building a picture of how your children thrive at your school
  • Moving from strong to exceptional
  • Pathway to excellence
  • Getting your head around inspection
  • Monitoring teaching; evaluating learning
  • Writing self-evaluation that matters
  • Self-evaluation for phase and middle leaders
  • Self-evaluation for subject leaders
  • Whole school self-evaluation
  • Self-evaluation for governors
  • Self-evaluation in the foundation stage
  • Scrutiny of work in KS1 and KS2

Record of Self-Evaluation

We can work with you on your SEF or record of self-evaluation. Our team has extensive experience working with schools across England in a diverse range of contexts. They can help you cut through the evidence to produce a sharp and incisive self-evaluation statement that draws on your evidence and ‘tells the story of your school’.

Data Analysis

We can work with you to ensure that your data ‘stacks up’ and tells the story of your school.

This type of work might include training and/ or scrutiny of external and internal data. Focus Education can also work with you to ensure that you have manageable and robust tracking systems that work for you. (See the section on data and assessment for further information).

In-school Review

We can work with you to undertake a range of self-evaluation activities that build an emerging picture of strengths and developments within your school. Many schools and academies use this to back up and validate their own self-evaluation statements and often share the report with their governing body.

These can include:

  • Lesson observations
  • Learning walks
  • Environment walks
  • Work scrutiny
  • Data analysis
  • Staff voice
  • Pupil voice
  • Parent interviews
  • Governor interviews


Support with Writing the SEF

Let us Write Your SEF with You!

We offer a service to help you organise your self-evaluation document. We look at each of the areas outlined in the framework, taking into account the documents you send us, and give you a very good draft. 

Focus Education has created an exclusive proforma, aligned with the new Ofsted framework, to take your information and break it down to the essentials that Ofsted is looking for.

We transfer your information, leaving you with a strong self-evaluation ready for your school leadership team to review before an inspection.

This activity takes place away from your school. Our experienced consultants will complete it and send it back to you.

What you need to do
We require copies of the following to complete your Self-Evaluation Document:

  • Latest SEF or SES (whatever state it’s in)
  • Last Ofsted report
  • Last religious report (if relevant)
  • The latest SAT results
  • School improvement plan (again, whatever state it’s in)
  • Anything else you may feel is relevant

You may need to provide specific examples for the SEF to better reflect your school. This service costs £350.

If you want to see a sample SEF, please email us and we can send you one.


Analyse Your ASP

A Consultant in Your School

This training helps primary school leaders, particularly executive headteachers, headteachers, heads of school and principals, and their immediate senior leadership teams, reassess their monitoring and evaluating systems. The training will consider aspects such as the place of non-core subjects’ assessment and what we really mean by the substance of education.

The training will:

  • provide you with a clear understanding of how to use your ASP to help determine ‘next steps’
  • help you consider your school’s context with a strong emphasis on, ‘What are you doing about the issues that hinder pupils’ progress?’
  • help you consider a potentially different way of evaluating the quality of learning and teaching, putting even greater emphasis on learning
  • provide you with a monitoring framework that focuses on learning and not teaching to assess the quality of classroom provision
  • look at the impact that developments around ‘reasoning and thinking’ have had on your pupils’ progress from early years to Year 6
  • help you consider how effective your broader curriculum is and to what extent you are developing pupils’ basic skills across the wider curriculum

This training aims to delve deeply into the learning culture across the broader curriculum at the school and academy levels. It will help you take a realistic look at what makes your school or academy great. It will focus very much on excellence and how to achieve it.

 

Effective use of Pupil Premium

This half-day session is for principals, headteachers, deputy headteachers, assistant headteachers and school leaders of primary schools responsible for allocating and measuring the impact of pupil premium funding.

The government regularly updates its guidance on pupil premium funding and holds headteachers and school governing bodies accountable for the impact of this funding.

The training will address:

  • tables that show the performance of disadvantaged pupils compared with their peers
  • requirements of schools to publish details online each year showing how they are using the pupil premium and the impact it is having on pupil achievement
  • the Ofsted inspection framework, where inspectors focus on the attainment of pupil groups, and those who attract the pupil premium
  • who qualifies for pupil premium grant funding
  • what pupil premium grant funding can be used for
  • what the best teaching and learning practice looks like for these learners
  • what the research and evidence tell us about the progress that premium funded pupils can make
  • how we evidence ‘impact’ in raising achievement and closing the gaps
  • how the school leadership can make a difference
  • what materials are available to support good self-evaluation and help show good value for money

 

How to book

Contact our consultancy department by email or fill in the form here. For more information, please see our consultancy page, which will explain what we can offer. 

See our resources on inspection by clicking here.