News

Ministers have decided to discontinue external inspection and improvement support for the quality of DWP contracted employment provision. This means that external inspections will no longer be carried out by Ofsted in England, Estyn in Wales and HMIE in Scotland. It also means that the Learning and Skills Improvement Service will no longer provide support to providers, although some of the workshops that they deliver through Price Waterhouse Cooper will continue over the next couple of months as we have already made this financial commitment.

For provision in the future, the DWP Provider Assurance Team will extend its remit to cover, in a light-touch way, some of the quality issues that formed part of external inspections. A new single quality self assessment tool will also be developed to replace both the existing Self Assessment Report and Quality Assessment Questionnaire. DWP will provide further information about what this will mean in practice as our development work progresses