It’s easy to treat the SAR/QIP cycle as a document-production exercise: fill in the template, cite the right evidence, submit on time - make it Ofsted ready! Teams that treat it this way tend to produce technically compliant reports that change nothing about how they deliver education.

The shift that made ours useful was insisting that every action in the QIP has a named owner, a real deadline, and a review date that someone actually attended, with evidence that was interrogated. A plan with no accountability attached is a wish list, not an improvement plan.

We also brought learner voice into the self-assessment far earlier than is typical — not as a box-ticking survey at the end, but as an input that shaped which weaknesses we chose to prioritise. The report that resulted was more critical of ourselves than any external inspector would have been, which is exactly the point.

So, here's to a new academic year and the opportunities it brings for continued improvement.