What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Encourage more young people living locally to attend the college to gain the skills that they need to take advantage of local and regional job opportunities.
- Ensure that improvements in the monitoring of apprentices’ progress and the support that is provided for apprentices who fall behind are sustained.
- Improve communication with employers to increase their involvement in apprenticeship progress reviews.
- Ensure that all teachers check that learners have fully acquired the knowledge and skills that they should have gained during previous courses so that they can identify and address any gaps in learning.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Teachers should improve the way they plan lessons to meet the needs of learners of different abilities, and ensure that the most able are challenged to achieve their full potential.
- Review and refine the systems that senior managers use to review the progress of learners to ensure that swift action is taken where necessary to address underperformance.
- Improve the systems that staff use for tracking, monitoring and reporting on the progress of learners and apprentices so that they can intervene more quickly to ensure that more stay on their programme, and achieve qualifications within the planned timescales.
- Improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment in English and mathematics so that the proportion of learners who achieve their English and mathematics qualifications, including high grades at GCSE level, is increased.
What does Derwentside College need to do to improve further?
- Raise apprenticeship success rates by sharing good practice between the college and its subcontractors. Ensure that the quality of support apprentices receive enables them to stay to the end of their programmes.
- Improve the impact of academic support by ensuring that all teachers use the results of initial assessment to develop personalised learning plans to meet learners’ needs. Ensure advice and guidance are accessible to all learners. Improve the systems used to evaluate the impact of support on learning.
- Improve the oversight of subcontractors by the governing body through a comprehensive analysis of the quality of their provision which is clearly linked to outcomes for learners.
- Strengthen and consolidate the work already started to improve learners’ attendance by sharing good practice between departments, particularly in relation to attendance at functional skills lessons.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- rigour of self-assessment and quality improvement processes
- improvements to the recording of lesson observation evidence
- less effective curriculum management in some areas
- continuing deficiencies in accommodation
- declining and now small numbers in the sixth form centre
- governors’ scrutiny of some provision.
What should be improved
- strategies to raise standards at levels 1 and 2 for students aged 16 to 18
- the rigour of quality assurance o a range of accommodation deficiencies
- identification of students' additional support needs
- access to support for part-time and off-site students
- use of individual learning and action plans
- contribution to meeting literacy and numeracy needs within college and the local community.
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