Education inspectors announce return monitoring plan after damning report

Councillors were told at the authority's full council meeting on Thursday, January 23, that the education inspectorate had been satisfied with Powys County Council’s (PCC) post inspection action plan (PIAP).

Powys County Council staff had met with Estyn for a post-inspection improvement conference on November 28, 2019.

Interim chief education officer, Lynette Lovell, said: “What Estyn wanted to be assured about is that we had coherent plans to address the issue and sufficient resources to implement the action plan.

“That we have rigorous processes in place to monitor the implementation .of the plan and evaluate the impact.

“Following the conference our officers worked on the PIAP and put some more details into plans.

“We are already moving at pace; we didn’t wait for it to be approved before starting our work, that started immediately after the inspection.”

Ms Lovell went on to say that there had been “intense engagement” with governors, teachers and headteachers and had hoped to do more but purdah rules due to the December general election had stopped that.

Ms Lovell added: “You will be aware cabinet approved further engagement which will be done in February.”

This will be for the strategic school review, this and the response to Estyn are intertwined.

Councillor Pete Roberts, chair of the learning and care committee added: “Officers spent 15 hours with scrutiny in five separate meetings looking at each of the streams (recommendations).

“They gave us significant confidence in their desire to move forward and turn this around.

“We have had more discussions and scrutiny will be taking a more proactive role and will be fully aware of what’s going on.”

In September 2019 Estyn published a damning report saying that there were many areas of the authority’s work causing “significant concern.”

Education – like children’s and adult social services has also been added to the remit of the improvement and assurance board.

The letter from Estyn to PCC was from assistant director, Clive Phillips.

Mr Phillips said: “The conference enabled participants to explore areas of the improvement plan which would benefit from being strengthened.

“We will formally review the authority’s progress in around 12 to 18 months time.

“This will be in the form of a progress conference.”

There the inspectors will be able to judge if PCC has made enough improvements to be removed from follow up work, or will need more visits.