Part C: Plan improvements

Having conducted your audit (or audited the agreed areas of practice for this academic year), you as the project leader should decide – with your full senior leadership team – which areas of practice to prioritise.

You can use the ‘audit outcome statements’ for your type of education setting (see Appendix 3) to help shape your thinking about what you hope to achieve in each area of practice, and what you want to achieve first.

You’ll also need to decide the timeframe for implementing the improvement plan: will a one-, two- or three-year plan be most realistic for embedding practice? While it will be important to maintain momentum, you’ll need to balance this with the capacity in your setting.

If you opt for a two- or three-year improvement plan, consider how you will update practice as learning surfaces, and how you will maintain motivation in the face of potential competing priorities.

Your next step is to transfer your priorities to an improvement plan and share this with your leadership team. If your setting does not already have an improvement planning format or template, you can use our example improvement plan [Download, .docx 237 KB] to help your thinking; it is structured around the six areas of practice from your audit, and the key themes within each of those areas.

The example improvement plan also uses the ‘Element to be audited’ statements from the audit template as suggested outcomes, but you can adapt these to your individual setting. Remember that these suggested outcomes are intended to be useful prompts for all types of education setting; they may be broader than necessary for your setting. Consider them as starting points, and tailor them so they best reflect:

• the findings of your audit
• the age and needs of your pupils
• your setting type
• the needs of your staff team
• your structures and routines
• other factors that are specific to your setting’s context.

Alternatively or additionally, you may want to incorporate some of the outcome statements for your type of setting listed in Appendix 3.

The next step is to identify activities that will enable your setting to achieve your desired outcomes. Your area coordinators are likely to have identified some potential improvement activities while conducting or reflecting on their audits. In some cases, reading and acting on the advice in the CSA Centre’s range of education practice resources will be an activity that helps you to achieve the outcome (see below).

Keep your improvement plan simple:

• Prioritise activities that will have the greatest impact on the priority improvement areas you identified.
• Give precedence to activities intended to develop your staff team’s understanding, knowledge, skills and confidence, before considering those that are intended for your pupils or other stakeholders.

Make sure that your improvement plan addresses the needs of particular groups of children who may be at increased risk of harm. Our advice guides (see Appendix 1) can guide your thinking about:

• ensuring a child-centred approach to avoid victim blaming
• capturing children’s voices to inform practice
• children exploring/questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity
• children from different ethnic, faith and cultural backgrounds
• children with special educational needs or disabilities
• children who have displayed or experienced harmful sexual behaviour, including online/technology-assisted harmful sexual behaviour.

The CSA Centre has an excellent range of free, evidence-based resources – some of them tailored specifically for education professionals – which have been developed to improve the professional response to child sexual abuse. We encourage you to use these to support your setting in addressing key areas for improvement that you have identified.

For a full list of these resources, and the key themes that they relate to across all six areas of practice in your audit, see Appendix 2 and our CSA Centre resources sheet [Download, .docx 228 KB]; these can help you to identify where our resources may help your future practice, and to incorporate them easily into your improvement plan as needed.