As the husband of a head teacher I gleefully read about the demise of the SEF. I regarded it as a bloated form filling exercise designed to make the job of the inspectors easier and make the job of self evaluation longer and more laborious than it need be. It's true, it did force schools to focus on self evaluation, but I was mildly surprised to hear about so many heads bemoaning its passing. It's as if the SEF is the only means of self evaluation that a school could undertake. Gove has made it quite clear which areas Ofsted have to concentrate on when making inspections so it would be foolish indeed not to take a good look at these sections in the SEF and use these as a basis for constructing a self evaluation framework based on your own context. I set up a Twtpoll on Twitter, totally unscientific, but hopefully catching a flavour of opinion, and at time of writing we seem totally split.
To vote, click here: http://twtpoll.com/s8ezuw