*UPDATE 27/3/23*
A recent question that came in from a school was answered by the SIAMS Lead for Blackburn Diocese.
- Q: The IQ7 is just for VA schools so is the advice for VA schools to select both IQ6 and IQ7 when creating RE boards?
- A: Yes it would be good for VA schools to select both 6 and 7 as for VA schools the evidence for 6 and 7 will be very intertwined
In January 2023, after consulting with The Board of Education for Blackburn Diocese and SLT from a Cheshire primary, we released new SIAMS tags on Blippit Boards. These tags are available now as a free upgrade for all schools.
What about the current SIAMS inspection framework?
Some schools will be inspected before the end of the academic year 2023 and ahead of the new framework coming in for 2023-4. Following discussions with the good people leading SIAMS locally, we agreed that the best thing to do was release the update and give schools the maximum amount of time possible to transition from current to future frameworks. We’ve already sent a PDF out to all church schools using Blippit Boards (<-download it) to help guide schools over from the current to the future SIAMS framework.
What does this means for the Dashboard?
In the dashboard, during the transition, schools may have charts and reports for a short while that will contain evidence tagged with the current 7 strands of SIAMS as well as the new tags that support inspection questions. That’s okay but, as your school reviews what it has captured in the app, the old tags will need to be removed by you and consequently will disappear from your charts and reports. The end goal is that you are only seeing and using the new tags by the end of 2022-3 academic year but you will dictate the pace of this transition by how soon to remove the current and replace them with the updated SIAMS tags.
What do schools often tag in with SIAMS?
In our Subjects category, you’ll see that nothing has changed and you still have access to the Big 6, RE, mission statement and so on. These are commonly used tags in tandem with SIAMS as is ‘mental wellbeing’ in the RSE tag category (below).
Future Blippit Tag Improvements
It’s possible that the new SIAMS tags may get refined over time in some way as Diocese training and working with the new framework really takes hold but for now, the goal is to give schools a head start. We’d like to thank everyone who contributed to this update. Ultimately, we believe that technology should work for you as schools and subject leaders not the other way around and we keep this at the forefront of our minds as Blippit develops.
The whole point of Blippit Boards is to make things more efficient while helping to make the most of subject leaders’ time & effort to make monitoring manageable & insightful to reduce workload. In a January 2023 Ofsted Inspection, Blippit was flagged during the Governors interview as a tool that was doing these things (reports in particular) as well as supporting Governors to see how the school vision manifested itself over time which was very reassuring for us and hopefully you too.
Are you a subject leader?