This week I report on a Governors for Schools free webinar on the new school governance guides, publication of updated guidance on sharing school attendance data, information on what to expect from KCSIE 2024 and the release of an Ofsted RE subject report.

Free Governors for Schools webinar on the new school governance guides
In conjunction with Better Governor, Governors for Schools are holding a webinar on Thursday 9 May from 8-9 a.m. exploring the new school governance guides to help you stay informed about the expectations of your role. They will discuss both the Academy trust governance guide and Maintained schools governance guide, which have now replaced the Governance Handbook. Use this link to register.

Updated guidance on sharing school attendance data
The DfE’s guidance on how to ‘Share your daily school attendance data’ now includes information about mandatory attendance data sharing, which begins in September 2024. The mandatory sharing of attendance data was first announced earlier this year in the February update to ‘Working together to improve school attendance’, which will become statutory from 19 August 2024.

KCSIE 2024 update
The Government has announced that it is to make only technical changes to KCSIE for September 2024, with a view to providing a more substantively updated document, encompassing wider changes, in 2025.

The DfE has launched a Call for Evidence from practitioners and others which is deliberately broad and seeks to reflect areas and issues that have been shared by school and college safeguarding professionals, or where wider systemic changes mean there is an opportunity to better align school and college safeguarding policy, including the findings from Ofsted’s Big Listen.

Whilst the DfE won’t be publishing the results of the Call for Evidence it will consult on any substantive changes it makes to future iterations of KCSIE, and school and college safeguarding policy in the normal way.

Ofsted releases RE subject report
Ofsted has published another of its subject report series, this time examining the factors that influence the quality of RE in schools in England.