What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Improve outcomes for students on level 2 study programmes by monitoring closely the impact of actions taken to address lower achievement.
- Strengthen teachers’ use of questioning to check students’ understanding and adapt their learning accordingly by providing teachers with suitable support and training.
- Ensure that the most able students are stretched in their learning, particularly in their theoretical work, by:
- giving teachers opportunities to work together in subject teams to identify clearly what students should be able to achieve in each of their subjects
- providing training and support that help teachers to provide an appropriate level of challenge for the most able students.
- Review the means by which students and apprentices are helped to understand British values and the dangers of radicalisation and extremism. Implement new approaches so that all students and apprentices are clear about these topics and have their understanding reinforced throughout their time at college.
- Improve teaching, learning and assessment by ensuring that:
- teachers promote high expectations of what their learners can achieve and that they set demanding work that challenges learners to make good progress
- teachers use all assessment information on learners to plan teaching, learning and assessment that challenges them to make the progress of which they are capable
- teachers set and review precise targets that enable their learners to improve the standards of their work, accelerate their progress and achieve to the best of their abilities
- teachers plan theory work that improves learners’ higher-level thinking skills, enables them to understand and apply theory confidently and routinely produce high-quality written work
- teachers of English and mathematics improve their teaching, identify learners’ skills gaps accurately and ensure that learners consolidate their understanding and excel through honing the required techniques and approaches in lessons and through independent work.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Raise teachers’ expectations of advanced level learners in lessons and support them to set challenging tasks, promote the development of higher level skills and ensure learners develop very good independent learning skills in order to increase advanced level success rates and the proportion of high grades. These improvements will also help increase the proportion of outstanding lessons.
- Strengthen assessment practice so that it is consistently good or better. Help teachers to use on-going assessment during learning activities to inform the structure, appropriateness of tasks and level of challenge of their lessons. Focus strongly on ensuring that all feedback includes detailed evaluation of strengths, areas for improvement, including development of English and mathematical skills, and leads to specific improvement points.
- Through training, strengthened moderation and/or validation processes and the sharing of best practice, ensure a strong and consistent focus on learning within classroom observations. This will help teachers, observers and managers assess the quality of lessons better. Additionally, strengthen the emphasis that managers place on teaching and assessment in teachers’ performance review.
- Improve the consistency of curriculum management further by securing even greater rigour in the college’s evaluation of provision. Make sure all course reviews and self-assessment reports include a better use of appropriate national averages so they are more self-critical and enable managers to identify clearly areas of priority.
- Refresh approaches to promoting equality and diversity across the college in order to celebrate all aspects of diversity with equal enthusiasm and imagination. In addition, sharpen aspects of analysis, such as ensuring the performance of all groups of learners, such as looked after children, are analysed and reported clearly through the college’s self-assessment report.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- the further improvement of satisfactory teaching
- ensuring that learners are not disadvantaged by continuing weaknesses in accommodation
- the use of value added measures to review overall college performance
- procedures to monitor the effectiveness of the college’s actions to respond to equality and diversity issues.
What should be improved
- curriculum management
- implementation of quality assurance procedures in some curriculum areas
- students’ retention and pass rates in some curriculum areas
- support for and teaching of key skills.
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