Exploring Neurodiversity Podcast – Steps to Outstanding with Marina Gaze

Welcome to Episode 2 of the #ExploringNeurodiversity podcast, a co-produced podcast mini series brought to you by @FENews and @CognAssist.

In this episode your hosts Gavin O’Meara from FE News and Louise Karwowski, Head of Science at Cognassist are joined by Marina Gaze to discuss Steps to Outstanding.

An expert in quality processes, Marina was Deputy Director for Further Education and Skills at Ofsted for two years.

Marina shares her views and insight for Providers, Colleges, Individual educators and teams to be outstanding everyday when supporting learners with Neurodiversity, not just when thinking of Ofsted of the new Education Inspection Framework.

In this Exploring Neurodiversity podcast we explore what steps we can take to encourage teams to be outstanding when we support learners with Neurodiversity. Marina and Louise explore how to start to remove the stigma and encourage everyone to be open and comfortable talking about Neurodiversity and supporting Neurodiverse learners.

Marina explores Providers responsibilities around quality, particularly with Ofsted in mind whilst supporting Neurodiverse learners. She also unpacks the recent Education Inspection Framework – (EIF), changes, particularly for supporting Neurodiverse learners. As the key changes came in September 2019, which was only about 6 months before the pandemic and the lockdown measures came into force in the UK.

As Covid-19 has transformed education delivery, we explore moving forward into the next stage to the response to the pandemic, how can we ensure that no learner is left behind? We also explore what the future of hybrid learning, online learning and face to face learning could be in FE and Skills, and what lessons can be learned whilst supporting Neurodiverse learners.

Marina then provides some helpful advice and insight as to what happens in an actual Ofsted Inspection (she used to be the Deputy Director for Further Education and Skills at Ofsted) and discusses data and what is a ‘Deep Dive’ when it comes to an Ofsted inspection and what should providers, their teams, so basically everybody be evidencing and keeping as data from now to prepare for this.?

To close the podcast we discuss how we can encourage high quality provision everyday and by everyone across the sector for every learner, particularly neurodiverse learners and to ‘keep it real’, not just for an Ofsted tick box or aiming for the Ofsted quality badge.

Check out the Exploring Neurodiversity – Steps to Outstanding podcast!