Advancing Quality Assurance in our Appropriate Body Service

Building on ten years tried and tested expertise and experience as an Induction Tutor, plus leadership of the Appropriate Body Service (AB), our Director of Teaching School Hubs, Jen Knowles, has been working hard during her first term in post to sharpen up the SWIFT AB Service for our schools across Devon, Plymouth and Torbay.

Essentially, we know that the SWIFT Appropriate Body Service is well established.
But as part of our commitment and conviction to supporting Early Career Teachers (ECTs) during their two-year induction, we want to be even better. Especially as Teaching School Hubs will be the main AB provider further to Department for Education reforms and this year has seen some significant transitional support in taking on Early Career Teachers (ECTs) from Devon Education Services. We welcome you, once again, to SWIFT!
 
One of the new aspects we are currently evolving is an AB Quality Review. Whilst this is suggested by the DfE, it is not statutory practice for Appropriate Bodies. However, we believe that it is important and we are working together with fellow national Teaching School Hubs, Harris Federation, Link and Star Institute to evaluate provision and work out ways in which we can be even more effective by engaging in a collaborative peer review process.
 
This has further motivated our thinking in terms of the assessments that we put in place to assess ECT's progress towards the teacher standards.
 
The statutory DfE requirement states that ECTs are required to have a formal assessment at the end of Years 1 and 2 of induction and SWIFT have a thorough process in place to support to the moderation of these judgements in line with statutory guidance. This process is carried out by a team of assessors employed by SWIFT who review the uploaded evidence and lesson observations and produce a short review comment that draws together key successes for the year and highlights next steps for the ECT.
 
But we believe we can and it is important to go beyond this statutory support for our schools. This is why SWIFT have now put in place a new review process for progress reviews. Every term, our team of assessors will review a 25% sample of progress reviews. In addition, our AB Leads will personally review progress reviews for all ECTs 'at risk of not meeting the teacher standards' and all reports where ECTs have flagged that their statutory entitlements are not in place.
 
Mindful of workload for Induction Tutors, the only change will be once Progress Reviews are submitted, to look out for an automatic submission notification from ECT Manager.
 
Then, over a two-week period, the Assessors and AB Leads will work through the chosen sample and any ECTs chosen for review will have an additional comment added to their form.
 
Ultimately, we want our SWIFT Appropriate Body Service to be a truly supportive two-way process for ECTs and schools and to benefit from our commitment to quality assurance through the expertise of both local teams and working with national networks.
 
As professionals, we can always improve. So, if you have any ideas for how we might be able to advance further our service, please get in contact at any point with your SWIFT AB Team and we will gratefully listen to your feedback.

By Jude Owens, SWIFT Executive Assistant 

find out more about the SWIFT Appropriate Body Service here