School Improvement & Inspection

As a school leader, how best to prepare your school and yourself for a ‘good’, relatively ‘stress-free’ inspection is always on your mind. While it’s impossible to predict the exact questions an inspector will ask, our experience working with various schools indicates that the following questions are typical.

How to use this resource:

• Review the list of questions with your senior team in your SLT or SMLT meetings. Choose five to ten questions at a time so this is not overwhelming. Or you could share these questions with members of your senior team and use this as a framework to structure your line management meetings.

• List the type of evidence you have in place.

• Use this as a go-to document for checking what you have and what you need to work on further.

Written by Costas Constantinou

Welcome to our inspection support checklist which has been designed to help you prepare for your next review. British/UK curriculum schools outside of the UK that follow the British curricula need to be recognized by the government through voluntary inspection. The Department for Education (DfE) has made it mandatory for these schools to follow the same standards that are used in England in independent schools.

This voluntary scheme recognizes the need for international schools to be involved and engaged with their local culture and regulations. At the moment, three organizations are approved to inspect and assess these schools, which are Education Development Trust, Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI), and Penta International. The purpose of the inspection is to inform parents of pupils enrolled in these schools on how they measure up against similar schools in the UK.

Generally, investigations will be broken down into two main sections – compliance: verifying whether a school’s policies and practices abide by the expected standards, and quality of educational provision: coming to conclusions about how well a school takes care of its students.

Finally, if you wish to speak to someone on our leadership team concerning this document, please contact us by emailing info@veema.co.uk. You may also want to learn more about the School Improvement Services we offer International Schools. To read up on all the details of our custom packages, please visit our website.

Written by Dr Julia Batters

Former Headteacher, Leadership & School Improvement Consultant