Regional improvement teams are a manifesto commitment
During the General Election campaign of 2024, the Labour party committed to establishing regional improvement teams in DfE.
When they won the election and formed the new UK Government, DfE began work to put these teams in place.
They have been renamed since then and are now referred to Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams.
Helping schools to improve in the way that suits them
The purpose of RISE teams is to work with schools who need support, pairing them with experts from the sector and developing plans to help them improve without changing their structure or governance.
Those schools work with DfE, advisers and supporting organisations to access funded support, known internally as targeted support.
Types of support
These changes mean that there are now 3 types of support that schools can access through DfE.
They are:
- universal support - available to all schools
- targeted support - funded through grants from DfE and available only to schools who require improvement
- structural support - given to schools that want or need to convert to an academy or move to a different trust
Focussing on targeted support
In Regional Services Division we have already worked on tools to help civil servants deliver structural support.
They are:
- Apply to become an academy
- Prepare conversions and transfers
- Complete conversions, transfers and changes
With the new RISE teams and the new policy approach, we're creating a team to focus on the targeted support and how users in Regions Group will deliver that support.
Ministerial priority and tight deadlines
Given that the delivery of this overall workstream is a manifesto commitment, it is something that the ministers and Secretary of State are prioritising.
A pilot of the new support begins in January 2025 and will run through the early part of the year.
That will provide an opportunity to test the policy and how it operates, and learn from the experience before a wider roll out in April.
We must have an minimum viable product ready to launch at the end of March 2025.
Digital discovery
The expectation was that the department would need to create a casework management system in order to process the improvement work.
The assumption was that this would:
- help teams deliver the support efficiently
- provide DfE with a record of recommendations and decisions made, by who, when and why
- assist grant teams in understanding who to pay, when and check that money is spent correctly
- enable DfE to audit the process and spot patterns and trends that could inform changes to the policy or process
Starting in mid-October 2024, a digital team was created to establish if a digital product was needed and, if so, what that should be.
There will be more on the discovery findings and the decisions the team came to about what, if anything, should be created in our next entry.