Quality assuring the work of the appropriate bodies: Collaborative pilot of a quality review

NTA, part of the CST family, is a large, well established national Appropriate Body working with schools and trusts across England, as well as some international schools. It was originally set up in 2013 at the request of the DfE, to provide a high quality, sector-led alternative to Local Authority assessment and accreditation services for newly qualified/early career teachers. As an organisation, it provides a high standard of service to its registered schools and trusts, evidenced by high levels of customer satisfaction, retention and continued year-on-year growth. In 2020, Sheffield Hallam University was commissioned by NTA to co-develop and pilot a new quality review framework. With a strategic objective to provide the ‘gold standard’ of induction for newly qualified teachers, we hoped to develop a framework which could be used to conduct a holistic evaluation of the rigour and depth of how we fulfil our statutory role as an Appropriate Body and inform continuous improvement. The intention was to identify how NTA could quality assure its offer to schools and trusts, drawing on learning and processes from other quality assurance models. From there we planned to build on NTA’s existing approaches, strategies and developmental activities, and design a model of quality assurance which might also ultimately be used by other Appropriate Bodies to review their own work.