Ambition receives successful outcome from Ofsted visit
July 7, 2022
We are pleased to confirm that Ambition Institute has received a successful outcome from our first Ofsted Lead Provider Monitoring visit.
Last year, the government announced that Ofsted would inspect lead providers as part of its Early Career Framework (ECF) and National Professional Framework (NPQ) reforms.
Ambition Institute is a national provider of ECF and NPQ programmes, and we were pleased to welcome an Ofsted inspection team to take a deeper look at our delivery as part of a Lead Provider Monitoring Visit. The inspection team visited us in May, and spoke to a cross-section of the organisation, including delivery partner leads, trainers, mentors and participants.
We are pleased to share that this was a successful process, with Ofsted reporting the following:
- Our ECT programme curriculum “maintains fidelity to the ECF and ensures that content will be delivered exclusively and comprehensively” and that we have provided “opportunities for flexibility where this is appropriate”.
- Our curriculum for NPQ programmes is “ambitious” and organised so that participants “build on their existing knowledge and skills within and across the programmes”. Ofsted also commented on the planned opportunities for participants to link their learnings to their own classroom settings.
- Our delivery partners have a positive experience with Ambition, calling us “responsive, supportive and reflective”.
- Ofsted’s stakeholder survey received 4,000 responses, with an overwhelming proportion of positive responses. As an example, one comment read: “the lead provider programme is excellent and has made a huge difference to the confidence and practice of our current ECTs.”
- The report concluded: “Leaders and those responsible for governance are taking effective action towards ensuring that the ECF training and NPQ professional development are of a high standard.”
Tom Rees, Executive Director of Programmes at Ambition, said: “We were pleased to welcome the Ofsted team to Ambition to inspect our ECF and NPQ delivery.
“At Ambition, we are dedicated to providing the highest quality, evidence-based professional development to teachers and school leaders across the country. We are pleased that inspection team recognised the high standards that we set ourselves for programme delivery. It is testament to the hard work across our delivery partnerships with schools, trusts and Teaching School Hubs that we’ve managed to achieve this quality in this first year of delivery at such significant scale.
“We always want to keep getting better at Ambition, so we’ll continue to respond to feedback and to review and refine our curriculum materials to help facilitators and trainers on the ground to further contextualise what participants are learning.”
What we do
Ambition trains teachers and leaders at all levels to get better at the things that make the biggest difference: what they teach, how they teach it, and how they create the conditions for schools to thrive.
We champion every teacher and school leader’s potential to develop, as the driving force for sustainable school improvement
Why we do it
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t do as well as their peers at school. When disadvantaged young children start primary school, they are often over four months behind non-disadvantaged peers. This gap doubles by the time they finish primary school and doubles again by the time they complete secondary school. At this stage, they are over a year and a half behind in terms of their attainment.
We know that improving teaching and school leadership is the best way to address this gap. No other aspects of the school system have as much influence on pupil achievement, particularly the achievement of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Over the last year, Ambition Institute has had the opportunity to work with 42 delivery partners across all regions of England to reach more than 23,000 teachers and school leaders across the Early Career Framework and National Professional Qualifications. We hope to continue growing our relationships with our delivery partners, stakeholders, and participants in the future.
Ofsted will be conducting a full visit of all our NPQ and ECT programmes, where we look forward to sharing more of the work we do.
Read the full Ofsted report here.