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What counts as evidence in a school inspection

What counts as evidence in a school inspection: the four properties that separate a dated, attributable, findable record from an assertion nobody can check.

Evidence is a record of something that happened, made close to the time it happened, that a person who was not there can find and understand without you in the room. An assertion is a sentence a reader has to take on trust. Nearly everything that goes wrong with an inspection folder comes down to a school having genuinely done the work and having only assertions to show for it.

So what counts as evidence in a school inspection has a short answer. A record that is dated, attributable to a named person or class, shows a change over time rather than a single good moment, and can be found by a stranger. Anything missing one of those four properties is not worthless, but it is weaker than the school thinks it is.

The gap between doing the work and showing the work

A school that has honestly improved reading over two years has done a hundred small things: someone identified the weakest readers, a teaching assistant ran sessions before school, a head of department changed how comprehension was taught. Almost none of that leaves a record by default. What survives is a memory held by four people, two of whom may not be in the building during the inspection window.

The uncomfortable consequence is that a school which did less work but recorded it carefully will present better than a school which did more and recorded nothing. That is not fairness; it is arithmetic. A reviewer can only weigh what is placed in front of them, and their job is to check rather than to believe.

The repair is not to manufacture a folder in the weeks before a visit, but to record as you go, in a form that still makes sense a year later. The discipline is dull rather than difficult.

What counts as evidence in a school inspection: the four properties

It is dated

An undated document is a claim about the eternal present. A dated one is a point in a sequence, and sequences are what tell a reader whether a school is getting better.

The date has to be visible in the artefact itself. A file modification date is not a date; it changes when somebody opens the document and saves it by accident. "Term 2" is not a date either.

It is attributable to a named person or class

Evidence says who: which teacher, which class, which group of pupils, which member of the leadership team wrote it. "Some pupils made good progress" cannot be checked. "The eleven pupils in the Year 5 reading group, listed below" can be, and a reviewer who reads a named record can ask that teacher about it.

It shows a change over time

This is the property most folders lack and the one that carries most weight. A single measurement is a photograph. Two measurements with the action you took in between is an argument.

The middle term is what schools forget. They keep the January assessment and the May assessment and lose the record of what was done in February. Without it, improvement looks like weather rather than work.

It can be found by someone who was not there

Test this rather than assume it. Ask a colleague who had nothing to do with the work to find, in five minutes, the record of what you did about attendance last term. If they cannot, the evidence exists but does not function.

Findability is mostly naming and location: one agreed place rather than one person's laptop, and file names beginning with the date in year-month-day order so they sort themselves. It is a boring convention worth more than most of the effort schools spend on presentation.

Assertions and the evidence that supports them

The quickest audit of a folder is to write down the sentences your school wants believed, then ask what sits behind each one.

Read down the right-hand column and a pattern appears: almost every strong piece of evidence is a small bundle rather than a single document: a starting point, an action, and a later look, held together by dates and names. Building the left-hand column is the work of writing an honest self-evaluation, which is why the two jobs should not be separated. Our companion piece on how to write a school self-evaluation form covers the writing; this covers what has to exist underneath it.

Why the photograph of a display board is the weakest artefact in most folders

Open almost any school's evidence folder and there will be photographs of display boards. They are the weakest thing in it, for five reasons at once.

• There is no date in the image. A corridor looks the same in October and in April.
• Nobody is named: whose work, which class, which year group.
• It is a single moment, so it cannot show change.
• The work on the board was chosen because it was the best, and a reader knows this and discounts it.
• It shows a display, which is the product of the display, not of the learning. A wall can be dressed in an afternoon.

The deeper problem is why it was taken: to fill a gap after the fact rather than to record something as it happened.

What would make it strong

A photograph becomes useful when it stops being the evidence and becomes the record of a sequence. Photograph the same pupils' work at three points in the year rather than the wall once, captioning each image with the class, the date and the task set, so a reader sees the demand as well as the output. One image showing a pupil's writing in September beside the same pupil's writing in February, with both tasks, is worth forty pictures of corridors.

The folder that lives on one person's laptop

Every school has one, and it is usually held by the most conscientious person in the building. That is precisely the risk. Three habits fix it, none of which needs a budget.

1. One agreed location everyone with a stake can reach, with write access for the people who create evidence rather than a gatekeeper who becomes a queue.
2. A naming convention decided once and used by everybody: date first in year-month-day form, then the area, then the class or person, then a short description.
3. A one-page index a stranger reads first, saying what is in the base, who owns each part and when it was last updated.

If your school works to more than one framework, or belongs to a group operating across borders, the location question gets sharper; the piece on maintaining one evidence base against four frameworks deals with that case.

How much of this you can build in a term

A term is roughly twelve weeks. If each middle leader adds two properly dated and attributed artefacts a week, that is twenty-four by the end of term and near seventy across the year, per department. Most schools need fewer artefacts that are stronger, captured at the moment rather than reconstructed in March. That is the logic that governs lesson observation records still usable a year later and CPD records that show effect rather than attendance.

A test to apply before you file anything

Before an artefact goes into the base, ask five questions of it. It takes about fifteen seconds.

• Can I see a full date without opening the file properties?
• Is a person, class or group named in it?
• Does it let a reader compare with an earlier point, or point to something that does?
• Would a colleague who was not involved find it in five minutes?
• Would it mean the same to a stranger in a year as it means to me today?

If any answer is no, the artefact is not finished, and the repair is usually one line of text added while you still remember. For the wider sequence, start from our guide to Gulf school inspection readiness; if you are weighing whether a shared drive is still enough, the guide to inspection preparation software sets out when a spreadsheet stops being a reasonable answer.

Frequently asked questions

What counts as evidence in a school inspection? A record made close to the time the thing happened, carrying a date, the name of a person or class, and a comparison with an earlier point. It also has to be findable by someone who was not involved. Miss any of those and you have an assertion.

Is a photograph acceptable as inspection evidence? A photograph on its own rarely is, because it has no date, no named pupil or class, and shows one moment chosen because it looked good. A captioned photograph that names the class and date, and sits beside earlier and later work by the same pupils, is much stronger.

How far back should evidence go? Far enough to show movement. A single term shows a snapshot; two points separated by several months, with the action you took in between, shows a direction. Most schools have enough recent material and too little that demonstrates change over a year.

Who should hold the evidence base? The school, not an individual. Evidence kept in one person's email or laptop folder disappears when they leave or are on leave during the inspection window. A shared location with an agreed naming convention is the minimum that survives staff turnover.

How Asabya Academy helps

Asabya Academy keeps the evidence base in one place rather than in folders: an evidence repository where artefacts carry their date, author and framework mapping from the moment they are created, self-evaluation against standards mapped to OAQA in Oman, the UAE School Inspection Framework, ETEC in Saudi Arabia and QNSA in Qatar, and an inspection-readiness view showing which standards have evidence behind them and which do not, in Arabic and English.