NEWS AND INFORMATION

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ACER awarded Silver level Investor in People award

The IiP assessor noted that the silver standard is a very challenging one to meet and is increasingly seen as a measure of a quality employer. ACER is delighted to be recognised in this way.

ACER wins award

ACER and Adult Community Learning (ACL) Essex have won the JISC TechDis OASES Award for Institutional Progress on Equality using Technology. Congratulations to Bob Read of ACER and Maria Neary of ACL Essex and all others involved in the project.

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ACER project participants receive MEP visit

Richard Howitt, MEP visited Kerry Foods in Norfolk to discover just how beneficial the training funded through ACER’s ESF funded Stepping-stones projects has been to its participating employees. The visit was reported in the EDP. Read the article here.

ACER newsletter

The world can always be described as ‘fast-changing’, but this seems more apt as time goes on. Leading, managing, teaching and learning and supporting this work is ever more time-consuming and yet there remains a need to stay on top of what is happening.

With this in mind ACER has produced a newsletter to cover key items of news.

Issue 2, November 2011

Issue 1, September 2011

ACER is pleased to announce the successful completion of the LSIS Regional Response Fund project

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Ofsted / ACER project

Following discussions between ACER’s Chief Executive, Andrew Thomson and Sean Hanan, Director of Quality improvement at Ofsted, a joint ACER / Ofsted project has been launched to discover new models for quality improvement in colleges. Six colleges are participating and an Ofsted inspector will work with each to identify examples of good practice. The wider context is work Andrew conducted as an Improvement Adviser this year. This was based on a coaching model for personalised quality improvement. At the end of the year there were the best results the college had seen in ten years. The colleges on this new project will be looking for evidence of improvement in students’ performance that can be achieved with reduced quality improvement workload. Successful outcomes will then be used as case studies on the Ofsted website.

Mark Less, Achieve More

As pressures on time grow ever more sharply, there is some good news. People speak and hear faster than they write and read: can this have an impact on the time taken for marking work and the impacts of doing so? Based on another project Andrew Thomson has worked with elsewhere, six colleges in the region are looking at ways of marking students’ work through the use of software that enables verbal comments to be tagged to work. So long as students can access the same software to hear the comments, this could prove a valuable ally to the hard-pressed teacher. The experiment with which Andrew was associated resulted in teachers spending less time marking and students gaining better understanding of how to improve their work. The ACER project will test the practicalities and the benefits – and the results should be available to all in the spring.

Wolf Report

The recommendations of the Wolf Report were pretty immediately accepted by the Government: the current stage is working out how to implement them. In some cases, this means consulting the sector about the best approach. ACER has been able to provide two unique opportunities to influence this thinking – a meeting in July with the senior DfE director who will finalise the response for Michael Gove; and a meeting in September with his Deputy, who will draft the response. The key areas for consultation are: