Who is this template for?
This essential self-evaluation template is designed for leaders of Further Education (FE) Colleges, skills providers, and training organisations in England. The target audience includes Headteachers (often Principals or Heads of College), Senior Leadership Teams (SLT), Governors, Trustees, and MAT CEOs overseeing multi-academy and skills trusts. It provides a clear, collaborative structure for assessing organisational performance against the core judgements of the inspection framework, ensuring robust, evidence-based evaluations in curriculum delivery, skills needs, and leadership.
Why use this template?
This toolkit transforms the complexity of FE and skills inspection preparedness into a streamlined, strategic process. It focuses professional insight where it matters most, delivering clarity and confidence to your organisation's improvement journey.
- Inspection Readiness and Alignment: Provides a clear, structured framework that mirrors the official inspection framework, ensuring your self-evaluation is comprehensive, coherent, and inspection-ready from the start. This is critical for meeting the expectations of the FE and Skills Common Inspection Framework.
- Empowering Judgement: Uses the core iAbacus process, beginning with the professional judgment of your SLT, before challenging and validating that insight against specific, official criteria embedded directly into the template.
- Evidence-Based Accountability: Eliminates the need for fragmented paperwork across different departments and campuses. You can attach all supporting documentation—including performance data, curriculum reviews, employer feedback, and reports—directly to each judgement, creating a single, robust evidence base for inspectors and Governors.
- Drives Strategic Action: The built-in "Helps and Hinders" analysis forces a deep diagnosis of why performance is at its current level. This ensures that the resulting action plans are highly targeted, addressing underlying barriers and amplifying existing strengths in provision.
- Fosters Collaborative Ownership: Enables diverse staff (e.g., curriculum heads, QA leads, business development managers) to contribute their perspectives and evidence to the same evaluation, building a powerful, shared view of the organisation’s strengths and priorities.
How does it work?
This template follows the standard, intuitive iAbacus process of moving seamlessly from reflection to strategic action. It uses five defined performance Levels—Urgent improvement, Needs attention, Expected standard, Strong standard, Exceptional—to grade performance across the following core Areas:
- Inclusion
- Leadership and Governance
- Contribution to meeting skills needs
- Curriculum, teaching and training
- Achievement
- Participation and development
Gaining Strategic Insight
For leaders of groups of providers, such as a MAT CEO overseeing multiple academies or colleges, the comparison features of iAbacus provide powerful strategic oversight. A MAT CEO would overlay the 'Whole-School Self-Evaluation' abacuses from all academies in the trust. This allows them to quickly compare overall performance across the core inspection areas, identify schools that require targeted support (e.g., in meeting local skills needs), and pinpoint successful strategies in high-performing schools that can be replicated across the group to drive consistent quality trust-wide.
Clear, Professional Reporting
When preparing for external scrutiny or internal board meetings, the platform simplifies communication. This evaluation can be exported as a polished, visually compelling PDF report, perfect for presenting to an inspector as a summary of the organisation's self-evaluation. It demonstrates a robust and transparent approach to improvement planning with all judgements backed by clear evidence and detailed action plans, suitable for presenting to the Board of Governors.
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.
