What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Increase significantly the proportion of learners on AS- and A-level programmes who achieve the highest grades, by:
- setting more challenging targets for learners based on accurate assessment of their starting points
- monitoring more closely the progress that learners make towards achieving their targets, so that they know what they have to do to improve their grades.
- Ensure teachers make better use of information about learners’ prior attainment to set activities which are sufficiently challenging, particularly for the most-able learners.
- Improve the quality of teaching and learning in mathematics, as well as attendance, by ensuring that teachers provide more relevant and engaging learning activities, for example by applying mathematics to everyday practical problems or the workplace.
What does the college need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that managers are able to monitor the progress of learners and apprentices fully effectively so that they have a clear and accurate overview of their progress. Take urgent action to resolve concerns where learners are behind with their assessments and are at risk of underachieving.
- Provide strong leadership and clear direction in the use of target setting and monitoring of progress to ensure a consistent and highly effective approach across all subjects in order to maximise learners’ chances of achieving their full potential.
- Support teachers to match their work closely to learners’ capabilities and to ensure that they challenge learners to gain the highest level of achievement they are capable of, particularly more able learners.
- Improve assessment practice including increasing the quality of feedback to learners to a consistently high standard and ensuring that teachers make frequent and effective checks on learners’ understanding and skill development so that they make good or better progress.
- Increase the extent to which governors hold leaders and managers to account for the quality of teaching and learning and its impact on learners’ outcomes.
- Take action to ensure that managers are able to evaluate the quality of teaching, learning and assessment accurately by using a wide range of indicators of the impact of teachers’ work on learners’ outcomes and progress.
- Increase the rigour of self-assessment to ensure that judgements across all subject areas and for cross-college aspects are accurate in order to provide a sound basis for improvement actions.
- Strengthen teachers and assessors’ skills in promoting equality and diversity in their lessons so that learners and apprentices develop a good and secure understanding of these areas.
- Develop further the analysis of learners’ progression between levels of study and their destinations on completion of their courses so that managers can accurately evaluate these outcomes.
What does Derby College need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that managers monitor rigorously current learners’ progress towards completing assessments and course work, and take prompt action to ensure that learners are on track to complete and pass their courses successfully.
- Raise the profile of underperforming groups within the college’s monitoring procedures by analysing their performance more sharply and taking action to narrow any gaps in achievement.
- Reinforce actions for improvement in GCE A and AS level provision by having higher expectations of learners’ progress in lessons, particularly the most able, and scrutinising more thoroughly the progress they make in relation to their target grades.
- Help all learners to make good progress in lessons by using information about their prior attainment consistently to inform planning, matching learning activities accurately to learners’ interests and abilities and by providing clear guidelines for staff to assist them in supporting learners’ literacy and numeracy development more effectively.
- Provide apprentices with a comprehensive review of their progress by better checking and recording of the effectiveness of support arrangements, more thorough checking of their knowledge of equality and diversity, and by setting clearer short-term targets to promote speedier progression for all learners.
- Increase governors’ scrutiny of learners’ success rates by ensuring they receive and consider detailed summaries of success rates for all learners including for long courses and compared to national averages.
- Develop managers’ skills in the analysis and interpretation of data including strengthening the approach used for identifying and analysing achievement gaps, ensuring full analysis of progression and destination data and strengthening managers’ understanding of value-added data.
- Embed quality assurance arrangements and support managers at all levels to use the outcomes of quality assurance to prioritise reducing further the unevenness between subjects and to take the development of the quality of teaching and learning forward at a faster pace.
What does Derby College need to do to improve further?
- Further reduce the gap in achievement by some minority ethnic groups, particularly for learners aged 16-18 so they achieve as well as other students.
- Ensure a more consistent approach to the promotion of equality and diversity within curriculum areas and across the college so all students develop a good level of understanding.
- Monitor and evaluate the impact of equality and diversity promotion on students’ knowledge and understanding and use the information to plan development activity.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- low success rates for retail and commercial enterprise learners aged 16 to 18
- declining success rates for GCE A level provision between 2005/06 and 2006/07
- poor accommodation at the Prince Charles Avenue site
- a minority of dull and insufficiently challenging teaching.
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What should be improved
- management action to raise levels of achievement
- teaching from satisfactory to good levels
- access to and the staffing of additional support
- quality and frequency of students' progress reviews
- use of ICT in teaching and learning
- staff use of data for quality improvement and course review
- rigour of quality assurance.
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