Ensuring Every Learner Matters CD-ROM

This CD-ROM will help principals, quality managers, curriculum leaders and many others to ensure that their organisations meet the needs of all learners who fall within the scope of Every Child Matters.

You can use the CD-ROM’s diagnostic and planning tools to ensure that your organisation meets the requirements of the Every Child Matters initiative, and in doing so demonstrate an important aspect of your “Capacity to Improve”.

The government’s Every Child Matters (ECM) initiative originates in legislation that aims to ensure a coherent approach by education, health and welfare providers in supporting the development of children and young people before and also, in many contexts, after the age of 16. The material in this CD-ROM uses the language and issues relevant to the different parts of the FE System and adopts the title Every Learner Matters, while embodying the principles and outcomes of ECM.

There are three substantial tools:

The Compendium
The heart of Every Learner Matters is a compendium of statements of good practice, grouped under the five ECM outcome areas in their original order:

1 Being health
2 Staying safe
3 Enjoying and achieving
4 Making a positive contribution
5 Achieving economic well-being

For each of these ECM categories, the statements aim to cover the full range of issues that might be applicable to the varied range of providers in the post-16 sector.

Finding the Gaps
The CD-ROM offers a set of diagnostic tools to help providers of post-16 education and training to check how well the organisation is doing against the ECM agenda, and find any gaps in their existing provision. Providers of different kinds of post-16 education and training will have priorities that may not be best reflected by the original ECM sequence of outcomes; the set of tools provides alternative sequences aimed at better reflecting the primary focus of four main types of provider:

Incorporated Colleges
Work Based Learning Providers
Prison Education / Youth Justice and Offender Learning
Youth and Community Education

Planning Templates For each of the Find the Gaps tools a matching Template is provided to help managers prioritise developments addressing the gaps identified. The planning template requires the organisation to ask itself a series of questions, including whether the gap needs to be filled, the actions that will be necessary, and how success will be evaluated. These planning activities can be carried out in a range of contexts, for example:

As a natural part of the SAR process
As an in-house improvement activity, with groups of staff from across the organisation or from a particularly targeted area
With external partners as part of a Peer Review and Development exercise.