Preparing and submitting your entry
We recommend that you:
- start planning your submissions as soon as we announce the launch date, if not before! We regularly have people tell us they wish they’d started planning earlier in order to gather the best evidence
- talk to us if you are unsure about whether to enter a project for an award
- familiarise yourself with the relevant criteria before you start to prepare your submission
- use our innovation checklist to assess your proposed submission
- focus on the weightings for each criterion to maximise the strength of your application. Criterion 1 (innovation) is marked out of 8. Criteria 2 and 3 (specific to each award) are marked out of 5. Criterion 4 (evidence) is marked out of 6
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start to consider what impact evidence (qualitative or quantitative) you need to support your application
- identify what, if any, additional material would strengthen your application, ensuring that you direct the judges to particular pages or paragraphs in longer documents submitted – but avoid uploading extra material if it simply repeats information in the online form
- consider preparing your submission as a Word document before pasting the text into the online form sections – this means you can start preparing early and won’t lose your information if anything goes wrong with the form
- follow the guidance referring to length / word restrictions and recommended file transfer methods when submitting any additional evidence to avoid having your evidence rejected
- have robust version checking in place as your entry is being prepared
- confirm with your team that the correct final version of the entry is being submitted
- ensure one person from your organisation has overview of all entries being submitted to avoid unintentionally sending in two entries for the same award or one project for multiple categories as neither of these are permitted
- submit your entry/ies in good time before the deadline so there is time to problem solve in case of any glitches or technical difficulties.
Lessons learnt – what makes a strong entry?
Natspec receives around 60 entries each year. The standard of entries is generally high, but some always stand out above the others and it’s these that make it onto the shortlist, and eventually end up with a trophy!
The strongest entries:
- describe practice that is innovative rather than generally effective provision
- provide a clear summary of what has been implemented, why the initiative was needed and what positive difference it has made
- clearly relate to the criteria for the category of award
- focus in depth on a particular aspect of practice, rather than providing a less detailed picture of a range of inter-connected developments
- relate to practice that has been embedded long enough to generate robust impact data but is sufficiently recent to not yet have become business as usual
- provide strong, tangible evidence of impact (qualitative and / or quantitative), from different sources, including feedback from students on how they are benefiting from the initiative. Improvements are typically measured from a baseline established at the start of the project (e.g. progression to paid employment from this programme is up 25% compared to last year before the initiative was introduced)
- usually include additional uploads to help substantiate the evidence of impact or more fully illustrate what has been achieved.
Please note that any media shared with us that contains student faces or information will not be shared outside of the shortlisting and judging panels.
Weaker entries:
- are not focused on innovative practice or do not clearly set out what makes the approach innovative
- include insufficient information about the project, and a lack of substantial evidence of impact. For example, they may just assert that the practice “has improved learner confidence” with no reference to baseline measures or individual examples
- upload photographs without explanation that do not contribute any additional evidence of impact on learners’
- include additional uploads which do not add value to the information provided in the online form
- do not show how learners have been directly involved in the project or initiative
- must not just focus on one individual learner if no wider impact is demonstrated
- focus on projects which have not had time to bed in and hence have not yet yielded convincing impact evidence
- demonstrate innovative practice but are not closely enough linked to the focus area for the award, or do not pay sufficient attention to the criteria that the judges use to make their decisions
- cover too wide a range of work to enable sufficient detail to be included within the given word count.