Tuesday, 19 February 2008

Quality Assurance

My office has a large plate glass window. In the summer sunshine, this window magnifies heat to turn my office into a huge oven. On winter nights, the window sucks every last bit of warmth from the office creating a large icebox. There is no radiator or air conditioning. At midnight, I was sitting at my desk in this icebox pulling together our submission for the NAVCA quality standard.

We applied for this standard nearly a year ago. At that point, we thought we would soon be introducing a new Contacts Management System to underpin much quality assurance work. But the funding for this was finally only released a fortnight ago so we are behind schedule. Over the months, several people have worked to make progress on the NAVCA quality award, but it has been difficult without a core system and of course there have always been other priorities.

We have twice agreed an extended deadline with NAVCA for submission and I fear we have tried their patience enough. Hence my late night solitary push to get a first draft submission completed.

NAVCA's five quality standards are very clear and very helpful. Within each Standard there are then a handful of outcomes. And then our outputs and activities have to be married up to the outcomes to demonstrate that we have met the standard. Some of the outcomes seem by their nature outputs rather than outcomes. And then the whole thing needs to be supported by evidence that sometimes looks like replicating outcomes and sometimes looks like stating the blindingly obvious.

I suppose in the fullness of time, the mysteries of the NAVCA quality award will become clearer to me: it is relatively early days for us. And our work on the standard has already highlighted some areas where we need to make improvements. But why oh why is the system complex beyond all possible benefit or justification or reason?

BME Advocacy

I arrived at 8:00 this morning to prepare for our interviews starting at 9:30. There were some good candidates, but we eventually offered the job to a candidate who had always made clear that she only wanted to work half-time. We agreed on the appointment, as we were morally and legally bound to do. But we could not appoint a job-share partner so we will have to consider repeating the recruitment cycle.

The BME Advocacy service will support families who have a complaint about an incident on HCC school premises where there may be an element of direct or indirect discrimination on grounds of race or faith. I am told that Hertfordshire is the only local authority that funds a BME Advocacy service in this way.

After the interviews, I had a review meeting with HCC (as the contractor) and with the Multi-Ethnic Curriculum Support Service. There are some tough targets built into the contract. If we don’t meet the targets, does this mean that the service isn’t required? Or simply that we are not sufficiently accessible to the right people? We need to start promoting the service very soon!