Justify the Need for Keeping Records and Describe the Types of Records You Would Maintain Essay

In this essay I would look at the need for record keeping and describe the types of records I would maintain as a teacher. Predominantly there are normally three reasons for keeping records namely for health and Safety reasons which may also be a legal requirement. Secondly for the teaching purpose so the teacher knows what the student has done and what there progress is. Thirdly for auditing and quality standards reasons which may mean the organization may need to satisfy external agencies who may have financial and quality interests (Watts 2008: online). To understand the type of records we need to keep we need to look at the learner’s journey through the course. The learner would normally join a course after being recommended or seeing some sort of marketing material. Here the justification to the organization of keeping a record of how a student joined so the college or training company could focus their marketing activity to those areas which are more successful. After this process normally the learner would attend an induction programme where the Information and Guidance forms would be filled in as well as the initial enrolment forms. Normally, at this stage the full structure of the course and the next steps would be discussed for progression on to other courses. Then the initial assessment would be done to see at what level the learners are at so if there is a need to give more supervision then that could be addressed at this stage or it could run parallel to the course. The diagnostic assessment would also be carried out at this stage to identify the strengths and weaknesses and highlight any skills gaps. The outcome of the above assessments would then become the foundation on which you would develop the Individual Learning Plan (ILP) for the learner, which will set out the learner plan to learn, the resources required and the timetable for the learning to occur. At this stage one has to remember that the teaching and learning of the course has not necessarily started yet this paperwork is normally filled out to meet funding, quality and legislative requirements. So the need for these records to be kept and filled out accurately may mean the difference in the teacher being able to deliver the course to that student or an extreme scenario of the college being closed to all students due to the quality of the records not being up to scratch. At the end of the day as Gravells (2008:10) mentions if you can’t deliver the session if there are good records which you have kept somebody else could deliver the session with minimum disruption occurring. This can only happen if records relating to the session plans and other documentation to deliver the course are at hand and can be accessed as well as the register to show the learner attended the sessions.