Toeing the line

Compliance with regulations imposed by Government bodies is a thankless task. However, it is not only important for successful inspections, it also ensures the business success of your school, write Bill Brown and Jake Anders

A positive approach to compliance is important to helping your school achieve its academic and financial potential and seeing what steps are key to achieving successful compliance in all areas.

In addition to getting it right, when it comes to employers’ responsibilities, there are four key areas of compliance that schools must take care to attain. They are:
• safeguarding children, including vetting and barring;
• health and safety (H&S), including learning off-site and educational visits;
• for those schools inspected under Ofsted 162A (as opposed to ISI arrangements) the School Information and Evaluation Form (SIEF) and inspections process, or other relevant inspection body; and
• employment, aspect and curriculum policies.

Clearly, there will be some overlap between these areas, but it helps to think of them as separate.

Step by step
Taking these in order, let us consider the importance of full compliance with the vetting and barring schemes provided to help schools ensure the safety and welfare of their children. It is important to remember how vital properly implemented Safeguarding Children procedures, incorporating checks of Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) disclosures and the other relevant lists, regulated by the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), are to potentially protecting the reputation of your school as well as individual members of that school. Any allegations against members of staff can have a detrimental effect on the school’s reputation, so it is important to show, were such an event to occur, that the school did everything in its power to prevent it.

Additionally, the current changes to vetting and barring further strengthen criminal sanctions available to the authorities for schools that do not put watertight procedures into place. It is very important that heads and proprietors are up to speed with all the new Safeguarding Children procedures.

Healthy approach
H&S has a well-known reputation as a minefield for compliance. However, the key to all successful organisations is the carrying out of full risk assessments for all activities undertaken by members of the school, whether day-to-day activities or one-offs, and the full implementation of the outcomes of the risk assessments.

Schools sometimes think it is sufficient to carry out a risk assessment and then ignore their own recommendations from it. However, this is worse than not bothering to do the risk assessment, because in the event that the worst does happen it gives a clear indication to investigating authorities that the school was not only aware of a risk, but failed to take sufficient actions to mitigate it.

In addition to this, H&S auditing both internally and by outside bodies is useful in building up a clear picture of strengths and weaknesses in fulfilling your responsibilities as employers and in exercising your duty of care for the pupils at the school.

Another key part of a school’s H&S responsibilities is the additional regulations they must take into consideration when planning educational visits or other kinds of learning off-site.

Under inspection
Schools must always consider careful compliance with the process of Ofsted SIEF and their process of inspections for schools that are not inspected under the ISC and Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI) or similar arrangements, but instead fall under Ofsted 162A inspection arrangements. Such inspections usually come around roughly every three years, unless the DCSF requests additional inspections, which may be for a number of reasons: including for changes of proprietor or if a child with special educational needs joins the school. Under such inspections and the processes that lead to it, Ofsted will be checking not only the standards of teaching and similar but also that all relevant documentation, such as aspect and curriculum policies, are in place and are regularly reviewed and updated as appropriate. Because the inspectors only spend a relatively small amount of time in the school, they must to some extent rely on what procedures you have in writing and the extent to which you seem to be putting procedures they see into practice.

Your chance to really shine is with detailed use of the SIEF form, which allows you to be objective about the way your school operates and provide appropriate references to paperwork to back this up when the inspectors are validating the SIEF against their experience when they visit the school.

In addition to the quality of the education provided by your school, Ofsted’s 162A inspections take account of other factors such as:
• spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of the pupils;
• welfare, health and safety of the pupils;
• suitability of the proprietor and staff;
• school’s premises and accommodation;
• provision of information for parents, carers and others;
• procedures for handling complaints; and
• compliance with regulatory requirements. All will be taken into account when it comes to the overall evaluation of the school.

Finally, the importance of proper policies and procedures being in place is key to an effectively running school. With many of them, including aspect policies and curriculum policies, there is also the added benefit of providing a great written record for Ofsted when it is validating your SIEF. For all schools, material change applications, such as a change of age range, must be approved by the DCSF, which will require evidence of a full set of school policies and which may additionally require a visit from an HMI or Additional Inspector (AI), which in practice is likely to take a similar form to a light-touch Section 162A inspection.

This highlights the importance of an in-depth set of policies and procedures to allow for maximum flexibility of your school to respond to changing circumstances by making material changes. Particularly key are employment policies, given that mistakes in this area can be financially ruinous for a school, while well-crafted ones help provide the flexibility an effective school will need to thrive.

Take care
Carefully considering all of the above for your school will help to ensure full compliance, resulting in improved performance for your school both in inspection reports and business performance. Allowing any of them to slip will result in not only disappointing inspection results, but also reduced school flexibility and hence declining business performance, as competitors seize on your actual or perceived weaknesses. On the other hand, careful compliance will give your business an edge that others often forget.

Key links:
• guidance on completing the SIEF: www.ofsted.gov.uk/publications/090135;
• Vetting and Barring Scheme FAQs: www.isa-gov.org/pdf/20090618-FAQ_current.pdf;
• Independent Safeguarding Authority: www.isa-gov.org; and
• blank Ofsted SIEF forms: https://forms.ofsted.gov.uk/blankpdf.aspx

Bill Brown and Jake Anders are, respectively, chairman and lead researcher at The Education Partnership (www.theeducationpartnership.org.uk). With isbi education consultants, where Bill is a lead consultant, they are undertaking research into the compliance and business management of proprietary schools in England. In return for completion of a questionnaire, they will undertake a one-day compliance health check for that school. Contact Bill on billbrown@edpa.org.uk.

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