Meeting FE Colleges' very specific needs
The need to... Manage self-assessments and inspections in a streamlined regulatory regime.
“Covalent have been extremely helpful in helping the College (with financial support from our local LSC) to pull together in one location the whole range of action plans, risk registers and performance indicators that we currently have spread across the institution. It will enable us very simply to map all of these to the Strategic and Development Plans, to the Common Inspection Framework and Every Child Matters criteria, and to external accreditation standards, and to attach evidence sources to them. The traffic light system for monitoring progress against targets is a very useful tool, and the reporting structure should make pulling together the evidence for the Self Assessment Report a much speedier process.”
Dr Jed Bultitude, Head of Curriculum Development, Otley College
Sir Andrew Foster's November 2005 review of Further Education Colleges advocated a drastic reduction in the 'galaxy of bodies' responsible for regulating the sector, the creation of a single inspectorate, and for 'a more light-touch approach to inspections'. The White Paper has since detailed a significantly new regime, with a shift towards greater self-assessment, backed up by much tougher sanctions against those colleges that can't, or won't, improve.
Most colleges now have corporate plans laying out a vision that cascades down into aims and priorities, with supporting action plans and performance measures. As importantly, they also need a system to track progress against those targets... which is where Covalent can help.
Covalent will lead to better inspection results by professionally presenting evidence of progress and a structured process for managing performance. Covalent acts as an Inspection Management tool by consolidating all evidence supporting a self-assessment. Scorecards & Snapshots demonstrate clearly (with green tick boxes) what actions have been completed and what progress has been achieved on key metrics. Relevant files and working papers can be attached as documentary evidence. The Models module is used to conduct self-assessments and to record inspection, or peer review, results and recommendations. Pre-defined report templates provide comprehensive evidence of progress, at the push of a button.
The need to... Demonstrate that you are a high performing college, and not failing or 'recalcitrant'.
In future, a much tougher stance will be taken on failing colleges, opening them up to takeover by other colleges, or in the worst cases even closure. Learners' experiences, measured through annual surveys and other research, should be at the forefront of colleges' strategic plans.
Covalent demonstrates the link between what you plan to do and progress made so far. You can visually map out your strategy in Scorecards, and assign performance measures to demonstrate progress against plan. Your own team, or third parties such as funders or students, can view progress on Dashboards that use easy-to-understand gauges, visually summarising current performance relative to target, or trend level.
Covalent manages non-financial performance measures. The software provides a very intuitive, visually-rich approach to pro-actively tracking relevant indicators such as number of research awards with industry, number of graduates taking external placements, number of IPR disclosures, number of business start-ups from staff and students.
Covalent provides a very simple project management tool that consolidates all action plans in play across the college, and delivers powerful milestone tracking facilities. It fires alerts and reminders for actions still not completed by their deadline date. Actions are colour-coded based on status, to quickly highlight those completed and those currently overdue.