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2013 Full Inspection Report

What does the Belfast Metropolitan College need to do to improve further?

The College needs to:

• implement a coherent strategy to improve the quality of teaching and learning across the College, that is underpinned by rigorous monitoring and evaluation, and a widespread continual professional development programme with a strong focus on developing effective pedagogy;
• strengthen quality management across the College, particularly the effective use of data and rigorous self-evaluation that is supported with more timely intervention strategies to address underperformance;
• clarify more explicitly the roles of the curriculum managers in monitoring and evaluating the quality of the provision;
• take urgent action to improve the inadequate quality of the provision in transport operations and maintenance, particularly assessment tracking and recording, collegial working and the process for self-evaluation; and
• strengthen the quality of leadership and management of the work-based learning provision, in particular the monitoring and tracking of the progress of trainees and apprentices, and self-evaluation procedures including the work of sub-contracted training providers.

2009 Full Inspection Report

The main areas for improvement are:

• higher expectations by staff at all levels of the standards of the students’ behaviour, including attendance and punctuality, to improve retention and success rates in a significant minority of the courses inspected;
• the limited full-time curriculum offer in the priority skills area of computing and ICT;
• the planning of the curriculum for the First Diplomas in electronics and electrical engineering, and in travel and tourism to improve the employability focus and engage students more effectively, and the planning for the First Diploma in construction to enable students to sample a wider range of vocational options;
• the development of strategies to improve students’ attendance at, and levels of attainment in, the essential skills of literacy and numeracy; and
• staff development for course teams in managing challenging behaviour, and opportunities for some lecturers in electronics, computing and ICT and travel and tourism to update their industrial experience.