Context: A small metropolitan borough wanted to understand how one of their existing processes to improve the graduated response was working. They convened a listening forum with over 70 educational practitioners who used the system to better understand their point of view.
What they did: They leveraged an existing network of educational practitioners and set up a time for people to drop in and share their views. The groups shared examples of when the new process had worked well and when they had found it more challenging.
What they found: They found that the educators liked the idea of the process and wanted to be able to use it more but often it was difficult to get questions answered, difficult to put the recommendations in place without further support and that some of the advice was too generic. The local authority focused therefore on how they could increase the capacity of the system and put some workstreams in place to continually analyse the categories of requests coming into their process, with advice for the most common categories being published separately. They also looked at training their advisors more on how to support implementing recommendations in practise rather than just issuing advice.
Challenges felt by the Educational Practitioner’s network:
