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A fantastic tool to help you audit your current whole school position is the Computing Quality Framework, which will be mentioned in more detail in the Developing Leader section of the Leadership Journey. An in-school audit of your teachers’ knowledge and confidence can be completed using something as quick and easy as an online form, where the results would come straight to you. Analysing those results might show you gaps in subject knowledge, or indeed reveal whether computing is being taught when you expect using the curriculum you’ve set out in your intent. 

I’ll be talking more about how to support your staff once the audit has taken place in the next section of the leadership Journey, ‘Developing Leader’ – Supporting Staff; which is also covered in more detail in the remote course Leading Primary Computing – Module 2. But before that begins, you it’s good to know your starting position; what are you working with?

This also applies to equipment. There may be old tech sitting in a cupboard collecting dust that could be utilised, or you might find you can make a class set of devices out of two old sets that might not be being used because a number of them are broken. Doing an equipment audit can also highlight where you need to spend your budget (if you have one!) – something I’ll be talking about in the ‘Established Leader’ section of the Journey, which is covered in Leading Primary Computing – Module 3.

In terms of monitoring the teaching and learning, pupils are probably the best people to talk to about that! Ofsted will certainly be asking them! Consider how your pupils will remember what they have learnt, are there prompts you can use? Reminders? Would they know where to go to find their previous projects and talk about them? If you have allocated leadership time for leading computing, consider spending a fraction of that each time to talk to pupils; they may reveal a lot more than you can see on the surface and give you a running commentary of how computing is performing as a subject throughout the school. 

What are your thoughts? Have you completed any audits? How do you monitor teaching and learning? Tell us in the comments!

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