What does the provider need to do to improve?
Leaders and managers should continue with their initiatives to improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment to raise standards further, focusing on those areas where achievement rates are not yet high enough. In particular they should ensure that:
- lecturers set work that is sufficiently challenging to help the most able students make rapid progress and achieve or exceed their expected grades
- lecturers provide sufficiently detailed feedback so that all students know what progress they are making and what they need to do to improve their work in order to achieve higher grades
- managers and lecturers support students to be motivated to attend their English and mathematics classes so as to benefit from the good teaching, learning and assessment identified within these sessions and, as a result, improve their skills and achievement of English and mathematics outcomes.
What does East Kent College need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that the robust quality assurance evident in most of the college is fully replicated for apprenticeships.
- Make sure that teachers’ planning for learning, and their feedback to learners, consistently meet the needs of all learners, especially the more able.
- In order to improve learners’ confidence and attainment in functional skills, ensure that all lessons contain relevant contextual content for their studies.
What does Thanet College need to do to improve further?
- Improve poorer success rates in under-performing courses by further building on the college’s good work to improve learners’ retention and share the college’s good practice in improving pass rates.
- Improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment by pursuing with rigour the college’s new arrangements for lesson observations and the associated support and mentoring for teachers.
- Ensure, when individual risk assessments are needed for young and vulnerable learners, that there is sufficient detail to protect the learner and reduce risks to themselves and others.
- Develop the newly introduced arrangements to support learners, to better inform tutors and learning mentors about learners’ needs and to provide an integrated approach to supporting learner progress and achievement.
- Improve the promotion of equality and diversity in subject areas, especially in lessons, to more fully develop learners’ and staff understanding.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- low retention rates, and the action taken to improve them
- the low proportion of good or better teaching
- the urgency with which quality improvement strategies are implemented
- unsatisfactory pass rates on AS level courses
- the development of measures to assess the progress that learners make
- the consistent and rigorous use of data to identify and address weaknesses in provision.
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What should be improved
- the consistency of assessment and achievement on work-based training and distance learning programmes
- insufficient use of literacy, numeracy and key skills in curriculum areas
- challenge in learning for the most able students
- unsystematic management of modern apprenticeship programmes
- enrolment, in those areas where this is declining
- retention and pass rates on level 2 courses.
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