What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Leaders should ensure that apprentices studying with subcontractors receive the same high-quality training that those under the direct supervision of college staff benefit from. Managers should ensure that apprentices’ employers know what progress their apprentices are making and what training they can provide at work.
- Teachers should ensure that students and apprentices know what specific steps they need to take to improve their work.
- Leaders should ensure that they have a thorough understanding of the impact of the personal development curriculum, and that they make changes where it is not effective.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that leaders, managers and teachers carry out their plans to improve the skills of level 2 and GCSE mathematics teachers so that they can better prepare students for their examinations and help them develop their skills.
- Continue to improve students’ attendance, especially of those studying English and mathematics, by taking effective action when students are absent from their lessons.
- Ensure that leaders and managers continue their work to raise the quality of teaching, learning and assessment by making sure that:
- teachers and assessors improve the quality of feedback to students and the targets set for apprentices at reviews so that these clearly show students and apprentices how to improve their work and their skills
- teachers of adult students plan lessons thoroughly to take into account the needs of all students in classes.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Sustain the high proportion of students who complete their studies and increase the proportion who pass their examinations through robust and thorough assessment practice.
- Improve students’ achievement of qualifications in foundation English and mathematics by disseminating the existing good practice effectively.
- Use the robust arrangements for performance management and the observation of teaching, learning and assessment to reduce the small minority of less than good teaching sessions by focusing on:
- improving the written feedback on marked work including more detail on why grammar and spelling have been corrected
- improving questioning in teaching sessions to extend and deepen the learning of all students
- improving how assessors and trainers involve employers more in coordinating apprentices’ on and off-the-job training
- further developing individual planning to ensure all students who are at different stages in their learning make even better progress
- supporting teachers to improve and share good practice across the curriculum.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that teaching, learning and assessment continue to improve, increasing the proportion of lessons that are outstanding. Help all teachers to make better use of learners’ initial assessment and diagnostic test results, to improve their planning to meet individual learning needs in lessons. Pay particular attention to this in lessons for learners on foundation level courses and on mathematics functional skills courses.
- Improve success rates for learners on the significant number of courses and subjects where they are still poor. In particular, learners’ overall success on foundation level courses is low and functional skills success rates, although much improved since the previous inspection, are still too low.
- Increase the extent by which advanced level learners make progress in their subjects, relative to their prior attainments. Most learners make only the progress that would be expected of them, with very few exceeding this, or achieving higher grades. In too many AS subjects, success rates are low, with learners not even achieving their expected grades.
- Improve the collection and analysis of information on the progression of its learners when they leave the college. The college’s current arrangements to do this are not effective; as a result, it lacks essential information to enable it to evaluate the impact of its provision.
- Extend the promotion of equality and diversity in lessons. Ensure that all teachers make the best possible use of wider themes of equality and diversity in teaching, learning and assessment.
- Ensure that the extensive opportunities for the use of learning technologies, including a virtual learning environment, are fully exploited by staff. Build their confidence in recognising the benefits of the resource and in using it.
What does Sussex Coast College need to do to improve further?
- Improve success rates on poorly performing courses through much closer monitoring of entry criteria, more rigorous target setting and better academic support.
- Improve success rates for work-based learners through closer monitoring of their progress and more effective involvement of vocational staff in recruitment of apprentices and in assessment and review procedures.
- Provide further training for lesson observers to ensure that they are diligent in judging the extent to which students learn and their progress in lessons.
- Improve the quality and use of initial assessment to ensure that lessons are planned to meet the needs of all students in order to enable them to achieve to the best of their ability.
- Implement a clear and comprehensive additional learning support strategy to ensure that support is targeted at those students who are most at risk of not achieving their qualification.
- Develop a better range of provision at foundation level to ensure that progression routes are clearer for students. Involve employers more in curriculum design.
- Prepare students better for progression to further and/or higher education through a coherent structure of individual and group support and by giving them more detailed and timely advice and guidance.
- Ensure that governors and staff at all levels take responsibility for monitoring the effectiveness of their work so that any shortfalls in performance can be identified early and appropriate action taken.
- Ensure that staff are trained so that they have the expertise and confidence to implement policies in relation to equality and diversity, student support and all aspects of teaching and learning.
What does Sussex Coast College, Hastings, need to do to improve further?
- Improve success rates for adult learners by ensuring that their progress is monitored as rigorously as it is for younger students.
- Ensure that all staff, employers and work-based learners are fully aware of the requirement that apprentices should complete their frameworks in the time allocated.
- Ensure that practical sessions are even more effective by planning more carefully how each student will practise the skills that they need to develop.
- Make more effective use of the vocational skills practitioner role by encouraging teachers to discuss lesson planning with the practitioners.
- Develop work experience for full-time students so that they have the opportunity to experience the industry at first hand.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- low success rates for level 2 learners aged 16-18
- continue to increase the amount of good or better teaching and learning
- further develop links between strategic targets and operational plans
- implement equality schemes and diversity impact measures
- inadequate construction provision
- insufficient monitoring of learners’ progress in literacy and numeracy.
n/a
What should be improved
- feedback on students' written work
- basic skills support for full-time students
- quality of teaching in a number of curriculum areas
- quality of some accommodation
- quality assurance in some curriculum areas.
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