What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Leaders must ensure that teachers identify accurately the starting points of learners who have high needs and use the information to ensure that they receive the appropriate teaching and support to help them achieve their best.
- Governors must ensure that leaders identify precisely the weaknesses in all curriculum areas, including courses for adults and programmes for learners who have high needs, and that their actions result in their swift improvement.
- Leaders must ensure that, where academic and vocational provision is delivered on more than one campus, learners receive a consistently good learning experience.
- Leaders should ensure that adult employability courses meet learners’ needs effectively, as well as the demands of stakeholders, such as the local combined authority and employers.
- Leaders and managers must ensure that learners receive the appropriate teaching to help them understand incrementally and remember long term new knowledge and skills.
- Leaders and managers must ensure that all learners receive consistently constructive and helpful feedback (oral and/or written) on their work to help them improve and achieve their potential.
- Managers must ensure that learners who have high needs receive the appropriate support, so that they can make the progress of which they are capable.
- Leaders must ensure that apprentices following pharmacy courses develop their English and mathematics skills beyond level 2.
- Leaders must ensure that adult learners and apprentices know how to stay safe online and know the risks posed by extremist behaviour, particularly in the areas in which they live and work.
What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Improve the progress that all students make at level 3, by ensuring that teachers provide students with helpful feedback that students use to improve their work.
- Ensure that senior leaders and managers use information routinely from the college’s new tracking and monitoring system to monitor closely students’ progress. They must ensure that teachers and their managers put in place swift and effective actions to support students, so that the most able students receive sufficient challenge.
- Ensure that senior leaders provide governors with sufficiently helpful information, particularly regarding the progress made by students studying at level 3, to enable governors to hold leaders to account fully.
- Leaders and managers should ensure that teachers:
- use information about students’ starting points as a basis for planning to ensure that the most able students achieve the grades of which they are capable
- use questions and other methods skilfully to check that all students understand and think deeply about what they are doing, develop their confidence, and make good progress.
- Leaders and managers should ensure that all students on study programmes develop industry-standard work skills necessary for their future employment ambitions, including ensuring that more learners have access to high-quality work experience.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Improve the progress that learners are making at level 3 by simplifying the current system for monitoring learners’ progress against aspirational targets. Senior leaders and managers must have a sharper and more reliable understanding of how well learners are progressing at more frequent intervals throughout their course and ensure that effective action is put in place to support learners who are underperforming.
- Improve teaching and learning, and the progress that learners make, by:
- clearly communicating to staff the common expectations and standards regarding learners’ behaviour and attitudes to learning
- making learners’ progress the focus for teaching, learning and assessment
- clearly linking areas for improvement with targeted staff development and following up this work with an assessment of impact on learning and progress
- building on the current assessment of learners’ starting points and using this more consistently to ensure that learners are supported and challenged to meet their full potential
- providing feedback which identifies more clearly the actions learners need to take to improve their work
- identifying and sharing good practice both within and between faculties.
- Improve attendance by building on recent improvements, and setting clear expectations that are understood by staff and learners. Ensure that tutors and student support staff tackle poor attendance swiftly and that the appropriate balance of support and challenge means that long-term absence does not impact on the progress of the whole group. This has a particularly negative impact on the quality of collaborative group work.
- Improve progress in mathematics and English GCSE and the development of mathematical and English skills by:
- building on the strategies and initiatives that have been recently put in place, and using the English and mathematics champions and lead practitioners to model and disseminate good practice
- ensuring that the impact of recent changes is measured, reported accurately and used to refine further targeted actions.
- Check that all managers are accountable for the effectiveness of the many improvements that senior managers have introduced and that they take action to embed these rigorously and consistently within their areas of responsibility.
- Ensure that all learners and apprentices improve their understanding of the risks of extremism and radicalisation and know how to keep themselves and others safe.
- Ensure that governors continue to focus more on the quality of teaching and on learners’ progress, and that they challenge leaders and managers sufficiently to make the required improvements in the performance of the college.
What does the college need to do to improve further?
- Improve learners’ progress, including in English and mathematics and on apprenticeships by
- ensuring that teachers set them challenging targets and tasks that match their individual needs
- taking account of their prior attainment and the progress they make
- raising learners’ expectations regarding attendance at lessons
- ensuring that all teachers give feedback on learners’ assessed work that identifies what they need to do to improve further.
- Develop further the use of ILT to improve learning in the classroom. Provide online resources for learners so that they make more rapid progress through continuing to learn outside the classroom and between workplace assessments and reviews.
- Ensure that all learners on 16-19 study programmes develop a comprehensive understanding of how the subjects they study apply in the workplace through work experience and visits to employers.
- Ensure all subject managers raise expectations and standards by evaluating teaching and learning more accurately, including the use of a broader range of evidence beyond that available through the observation of lessons, and focusing more precisely on the impact of teachers’ activities on learners’ learning.
- Strengthen the management of staff performance and hold them more accountable for learners’ performance. Ensure that staff have clear and precise action plans and that managers review these frequently to enable them to tailor continuing professional development closely to individual staff needs. Develop staff development activities so that they involve all teachers in improving their practice, and ensure that teachers in high-performing subjects share their best practice.
What does Birmingham Metropolitan College need to do to improve further?
- Increase success rates on long courses, and especially at advanced level, by improving the quality of learners’ individual target setting in progress reviews, individual learning plans and lessons and by monitoring the value and usefulness of these targets more rigorously.
- Improve the management of apprenticeship training programmes so that high proportions of learners succeed and do so within the expected time.
- Improve learners’ experience and progress in lessons by ensuring that teachers use initial assessment information to set challenging activities for each learner, that they check each learner’s understanding and that they share the good teaching and assessment practices which exist in the college.
- Increase the rigour of the moderation of lesson observations by ensuring that all observers give due priority to the key areas for improvement especially the quality of learning and that their grading more accurately reflects the learners’ experience.
- Ensure that all managers make a more rigorous self-critical analysis of performance as part of their self-assessment process, and set and monitor closely specific targets to improve provision, especially for outcomes for learners.
- Ensure that managers’ analysis of all aspects of college life includes a clear consideration of the impact on different groups of learners. Identify and monitor rigorously specific actions to remove the underperformance by certain groups of learners from minority ethnic backgrounds.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- pass rates on a few AS courses
- success rates on short courses for 16 to 19 year olds
- punctuality in arriving for the start of lessons
- ensuring learners are fully engaged in all lessons
- quality of provision in ESOL.
What should be improved
- low retention rates on some general certificate of education advanced-level (GCE Alevel) courses
- unsatisfactory teaching in some curriculum areas
- some unsuitable teaching accommodation
- insufficient sharing of good practice.
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