A strategy launched this week to raise the quality of education in colleges and training centres will slash paperwork by at least a third, the Learning and Skills Council confidently predicts.
The council has produced a radically slimmed-down “performance review”, a system devised to check student progress and monitor the quality and financial health of providers.
The original review - carried out three times a year - created furore. College managers and private training providers said it duplicated inspections and created excessive red tape and paperwork.
The new review system was devised by the council in partnership with all main players - including the Association of Colleges, Association of Learning Providers and Sixth Form Colleges Employers Forum.
The number of reviews is cut from three to two a year, there will be just five categories of performance, and information will be collected just once by the local LSCs but used often.
Multiple demands for the same student information in many forms created a welter of complaints in the past.
Avril Willis, LSC director of quality, said: “The performance review does work. Its main purpose is to drive up quality. It gives us an early warning of problems and helps identify solutions far quicker than we used to. What we have produced here in partnership will improve things further.”
The AoC welcomed the new measures. Judith Norrington, director of curriculum and quality, said: “This is the basis for good advancement, but at the end of the day it comes down to how people operate the system. It needs to feel like a partnership and people carrying out the reviews must have the training and experience to make the judgments.”
Five descriptions of performance will be used: “excellent”, “strong”, “acceptable”, “gives cause for some concerns”, and “gives cause for serious concerns”.
Some groups, such as inspectors, have expressed serious reservations over the use of a five-point scale that still looks too much like inspection grades.
