Who is this template for?
This template is designed for Headteachers and Senior Leadership Teams in Catholic schools across England. It provides a clear, structured process to support, evaluate, and promote the Church's mission within your school, ensuring you are fully prepared for a Catholic Schools Inspection.
Why use this template?
This template provides a definitive framework to evaluate your school's Catholic life and mission with confidence and clarity. It moves self-evaluation beyond a compliance exercise, turning it into a meaningful process of reflection and strategic improvement that is directly aligned with the CSI handbook.
- Ensure Inspection Readiness: The template is structured around the official CSI grade descriptors, ensuring your self-evaluation is comprehensive, relevant, and directly addresses the key areas an inspector will focus on.
- Build Robust, Evidence-Based Judgements: The iAbacus process prompts you to link every judgement to specific evidence—be it documentation, observations, or stakeholder feedback—creating a clear and defensible audit trail for your evaluation.
- Promote a Shared Understanding: By involving your leadership team in a collaborative evaluation, you build a collective understanding of the school's strengths and areas for development in its Catholic life, fostering a unified approach to improvement.
- Streamline Strategic Planning: The analysis of 'helping' and 'hindering' factors directly informs your action planning, ensuring that your improvement strategies are targeted, effective, and focused on enhancing the Church's mission.
- Save Time and Reduce Workload: With a pre-configured structure that mirrors the inspection framework, you can focus your energy on the substance of the evaluation rather than on creating documents from scratch.
- Strengthen Governance and Accountability: Provide governors and diocesan representatives with clear, concise, and professional reports on the school's performance, demonstrating a proactive and rigorous approach to upholding its Catholic identity.
How does it work?
This template follows the standard, intuitive iAbacus process of making a judgement, verifying it with criteria, providing evidence, analysing factors, and planning for success. It is structured around the nine key areas of the Catholic Schools Inspection framework:
- CLM1: Pupil contribution to and benefit from school life
- CLM2: Quality of provision for school life and mission
- CLM3: Leaders' promotion and evaluation of school mission
- RE1: Pupil achievement and enjoyment in religious education
- RE2: Quality of teaching, learning and assessment
- RE3: Leaders' oversight of religious education
- CW1: Pupil participation and response to collective worship
- CW2: Quality of school's collective worship provision
- CW3: Leaders' oversight of collective worship provision
Gaining Strategic Insight
For leaders of Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs), this template provides a powerful tool for strategic oversight. A MAT CEO can overlay the completed abacuses from all academies in the trust. This creates an instant, panoramic view of performance across the group, allowing leaders to quickly compare overall judgements, identify schools that require targeted support, and pinpoint successful strategies in high-performing schools that can be replicated to raise standards for all.
Clear, Professional Reporting
With a single click, your entire evaluation can be exported into a polished and professional PDF report. This summary is ideal for sharing with a Catholic Schools Inspector, providing them with a clear, concise, and evidence-based overview of the school's self-evaluation, demonstrating a thorough and well-prepared approach to the inspection process.
References / Source Material
How to Get Started
New to iAbacus? Discover how this template can support your improvement strategy. Book a personalised demo or start a free trial to explore the full platform. Visit www.iAbacus.com to learn more.
Already a subscriber? You can find this template in the template library within your iAbacus account. Simply log in, create a new abacus, and select it from the list to get started.
