Assessment Only Route to QTS: D5 record of standards

By Pete on March 19, 2025 • ( 0 )

Comment from a reader on my recent post about the Assessment Only route:

Here are some general tips on compiling your D5 record of standards doc for the AO route through Sunderland, with some screenshots of mine included for reference.

Note:

I can’t really provide more examples than this as the evidence compiled is often confidential – I’ve just chosen a couple of my more general responses within the D5 doc
This was my approach, it was not official guidance from the uni. Generally speaking, the assessors and my mentor were positive about my approach to the doc so you could take the examples as WAGOLLs. That said, there’s more than one way to approach it.
There was an example completed D5 doc provided by the uni, so go by that first.

The D5 doc in general

The D5 doc is one of the most important for the course. It is your record of evidence for how you meet each of the DoE teacher’s standards (see here for the list of standards).

The first time the D5 is viewed by your assessor will be prior to the interview stage. They do an audit prior to the interview to review evidence you have gathered so far, offer feedback on relevance/ suitability of your evidence, and advise on how you might further demonstrate that you meet each standard. Their findings are then discussed during your interview. Should you be successful at interview, you can then act on the feedback given during the 12-week assessment phrase.

You should continue to update the D5 doc throughout the AO process. It is reviewed at the mid-term point (by your mentor and your assessor) and then at the end of the assessment phase. There are plenty of opportunities for feedback and time to ask questions regarding the evidence you are putting forward for review.

What constitutes evidence?

The type of evidence I submitted across the 8 standards (plus ‘Part 2’) was certainly varied. There are 38 sub-standards across the categories, so lots of ground to cover! Examples of my evidence included…

curriculum overviews
whole units of work
lesson plans (often annotated or with an accompanying rationale)
lesson resources such as slides or handouts. These were sometimes just one or two slides (e.g. to show things like effective lesson starters, the way that teaching a subskill might be approached, and so on)
standardised in-house resources (e.g. the school marking code)
photos of our learning environment
example student work (such as some including my feedback)
assessment cover sheets (e.g. to demonstrate clear success criteria, differentiation, etc)
assessment reflection sheets
students’ Bell data trackers
department data summaries, and copies of the dept markbook
other dept docs like development plans, teaching and learning foci for the dept, etc.
observation feedback
CPD slides (such as for CPD I had delivered)
posters for parent info sessions
PDF copies of email correspondence to students, parents, teachers, etc
extracts from my own writing/reflections (such as from this blog)
extracts from my professionally published work (such as articles for industry mags, or books)
school policy docs
homework tasks
links to student padlets and other tech tools
annotated learner profiles
boring things like my attendance record (for Part 2 ‘professional conduct’) and testimonials from leaders on my professionalism. I bribed them obviously.

What constitutes ‘good’ evidence?

Ha. Well, I included all the above at various times as relevant evidence. However, sometimes this needed a bit of explaining. I mentioned occasionally writing a rationale along with lesson plans to make the reasons for my approach/strategies/etc more explicit. I also included write-ups or reflections to accompany any photo evidence, just to give it context. Longer write ups were included in separate word docs, but short enough ones appeared in the description box in my D5 doc, like this:

I’m stating the obvious I know, but my general rule was that if the evidence isn’t clear enough on its own then provide a write up. Some of my evidence links were literally just to a photo of my classroom displays, but I explained how this constituted meaningful/impactful evidence SOMEWHERE alongside it.

Anyhow, you’re not on your own in deciding whether something constitutes good evidence for your portfolio. Your mentor and tutor are always there to ask.

How much evidence did I include for each point?

I made sure that I had at least two pieces of good evidence for each of the 38 sub-standards. As you can see from the above image, sometimes I added more. At times, maybe overkill. However, it is worth remembering that a piece of evidence can be reused across multiple standards.

Example: in the above image showing evidence for 1.1, I mentioned our vocab envelopes for new words.

I reused that evidence for 1.3 (demonstrating behaviours expected of pupils) after I live-modelled a ‘oooh a new word!’ moment in a class and demonstrated how learners can record/explore this.

So, yes I did include lots of evidence, but there were repeats at times and that was fine with the tutors. Provided it was good evidence…

How did I address areas of development after each evidence audit?

FYI most of my descriptions started like this:

I put the key bits in bold, in case the assessors wanted to scan through it. I guess they’ve a lot of these to look at, so I thought it better to just draw out the key info from my rambles.

After the audit, I added relevant feedback from that to the description section in the doc. Then, having found evidence to address the gaps outlined by assessors, I’d add an update to the same column in the evidence doc. I colour-coded this to make it clear that there was an ongoing journey and that I’d acted on the feedback.

I also made it clear in the evidence hyperlink section which evidence was in response to the audit.

Final thoughts on the evidence gathering

After the first audit, my tutor said ‘look, don’t overthink it. We’re accepting you onto the AO route as it seems clear that you demonstrate the skills and knowledge needed to attain QTS. The evidence will likely already be there in your practice, you just need to draw it out!’. Great advice – this route is not for those completely new to teaching. They’ll be lots of evidence already embedded in our practice – we just might not realise it in the same way as we would when we are more consciously learning the ropes as new teachers.

Who am I kidding? You know the hardest evidence for me to find was examples of my classroom routines. Wow – the AO process highlighted to me that I needed to go back to basics in some areas of my practice – I’d let some fundamentals slip. And that was a very worthwhile reflection.

Anyhow – you’ve got this! Good luck!