What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Ensure that managers and teachers design an ambitious and appropriate curriculum for students with complex needs so that these students can develop their independent living skills.
- Ensure that teachers of students with complex needs use the most up-to-date and age-appropriate resources, including digital technologies, when teaching.
- Ensure that all apprentices receive impartial and independent careers advice at different stages in their programmes so they can decide their next steps.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Improve the reliability of self-assessment by ensuring that leaders and managers recognise the significance of the weaknesses that they identify.
- Set and implement clear and precise improvement actions to address weaknesses in provision quickly.
- Further improve the leadership of the apprenticeship provision to ensure that a much larger proportion of apprentices successfully complete their programme within the planned time.
- Ensure that managers carrying out performance management reviews of teaching staff set challenging targets to improve teaching practice and the progress that learners and apprentices make.
- Improve the progress that learners on study programmes make by:
- ensuring that teachers take account of learners’ starting points when planning and delivering learning sessions
- ensuring that a greater proportion of learners achieve their full potential, especially the most able
- setting targets for learners that focus on the skills that they need to develop and not solely on the completion of tasks or qualifications
- identifying quickly when learners fall behind and using appropriate interventions to enable them to catch up rapidly.
- Improve teaching on English and mathematics courses so that the proportion of study programme learners who achieve a high-grade pass in GCSE English and mathematics or achieve functional skills qualifications increases rapidly.
What does Bishop Auckland College need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that the rate of improvement, particularly in retention, is accelerated and sustained in all areas of provision, particularly in the areas where improvement has been slower.
- Improve attendance by devising more robust ways of recording and monitoring the attendance of all students but especially those on programmes that are delivered flexibly.
- Ensure that all lessons include activities that stretch and challenge the abilities of all students. Improve questioning techniques that teachers use so that they check fully students’ understanding and how well they are learning and making progress.
- Improve links with employers to increase the work-based learning provision and to improve students’ opportunities to gain work experience and improve their job prospects.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- low retention rates
- low success rates at level 3 for 16 to 18 year olds
- the lack of improvement in success rates for most groups of learners
- insufficient challenge for more able learners
- consistency in the quality assurance of tutorials.
What should be improved
- poor and declining retention rates
- poor attendance on some courses
- some dull and uninspiring teaching
- insufficient tutorial support for part-time students
- poor key skills pass rates
- little use of the student intranet in teaching and learning.
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