Who is this template for?
This template is designed for senior leaders across the Scottish college sector who are responsible for driving and evidencing improvement. It is ideal for Headteachers, Rectors, and Senior Leadership Teams undertaking a comprehensive whole-college self-evaluation. It also provides essential strategic oversight for Governors, Trustees, and leaders of college regions, local authorities, or federations.
Why use this template?
- Align with National Standards: This template provides a clear, structured framework that directly mirrors the Quality Indicators in Education Scotland’s ‘How good is our college?’, ensuring your self-evaluation is comprehensive, relevant, and inspection-ready.
- Drive Meaningful Improvement: It moves beyond a simple compliance exercise, guiding your team to make robust, evidence-based judgements about the quality of provision and services. This focus helps create targeted action plans that lead to genuine improvement.
- Enhance Collaboration: The process encourages deep collaboration between senior and middle leaders, helping to build a shared, accurate understanding of the college’s strengths and areas for development across all departments.
- Simplify Reporting: Use the evaluation to clearly and effectively report on progress against your college’s outcome agreements, providing stakeholders with a clear, evidence-rich narrative of performance and impact.
- Build Confidence for External Scrutiny: By engaging with the same framework used by inspection teams, you build confidence and capacity within your leadership team, ensuring you are well-prepared to articulate your improvement journey.
How does it work?
This template uses the standard, intuitive iAbacus process. You and your team will make professional judgements by sliding beads, verify them against the embedded criteria, provide supporting evidence, analyse the factors helping or hindering progress, and build a targeted action plan.
The evaluation is structured around the following key areas from the ‘How good is our college?’ framework:
- 1.1 Governance and leadership of change
- 1.2 Leadership of learning and teaching
- 1.3 Leadership of services to support learning
- 1.4 Evaluation leading to improvement
- 2.1 Safeguarding and child protection
- 2.2 Curriculum
- 2.3 Learning, teaching and assessment
- 2.4 Services to support learning
- 2.5 Transitions
- 2.6 Partnerships
- 3.1 Wellbeing, equality and inclusion
- 3.2 Equity, attainment and achievement of all learners
Gaining Strategic Insight
A Director of a college region or a leader of a federation can gain powerful strategic insight by using the iAbacus 'Overlay' feature. By overlaying the completed 'How good is our College?' abacuses from all colleges in the group, they can instantly compare overall performance. This provides a clear, visual overview, making it easy to identify colleges that may require targeted support, pinpoint successful strategies in high-performing institutions that can be replicated, and understand collective strengths and challenges across the region.
Clear, Professional Reporting
With one click, you can export your entire evaluation into a professional, visually compelling PDF report. This is perfect for sharing with your Board of Management, Governors, or Trustees to provide a clear and concise summary of the college’s self-evaluation for a board meeting. The report can also be used to provide an inspector with a comprehensive, evidence-based overview of your college's performance and improvement priorities.
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.
