What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Leaders and managers should work with staff in information technology and health and social care to develop a clear understanding of what students need to know for their next steps, to understand how best to sequence learning, and to develop their teaching skills.
- Leaders and managers should work with staff to help them develop their understanding of how to use feedback most effectively.
- Leaders, managers and staff should work with students to ensure they understand British values and the threats posed by those with radical and extremist views.
- Governors should provide leaders and managers with greater challenge and take a more active role in driving further improvements at the college.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Leaders and managers should monitor and evaluate the impact of recently introduced initiatives to improve teaching, learning and assessment across all areas of the college, and ensure that these are sustainable over time.
- Managers should improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment of functional skills in English and mathematics and set challenging targets for teaching staff to improve weaker aspects of their practice, as identified through lesson observations and data about students’ progress and their achievement.
- Managers should support teachers to: make effective use of information from initial and diagnostic assessments of students’ skills and abilities, and their current attainment; and ensure they set work that enables all students to make the progress of which they are capable, and progress to their intended destination.
- Managers should ensure that all students, where relevant, benefit from high-quality work experience placements and activities to enable them to develop the essential skills for employment.
- Managers should ensure that teachers and educational care support workers are skilled in providing students with effective feedback, so that they know exactly how to improve their work to achieve their learning aims.
- Governors should hold the new leadership team to account relentlessly for the improvement of the quality of teaching, learning and assessment, leading to a rapid and sustainable improvement in students’ progress and achievement.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Improve the rigour and accuracy of quality assurance and self-assessment and, consequently, the quality and impact of improvement actions.
- Refocus college staff on improving the progress of all students by:
- increasing and clarifying expectations so that teachers understand how much progress students should make and the means by which this should be achieved
- ensuring teachers provide activities that challenge all students, including the most able
- ensuring that progress coaches widen their focus so that, as well as supporting those students at risk of leaving the college, they help all students achieve or exceed their target grades
- ensuring that managers monitor closely the progress of students and intervene quickly and appropriately when it is not in line with expectations
- implementing systematic ways of sharing good practice in teaching, learning and assessment, drawing on areas of strength in the college
- coordinating all these efforts so that all staff follow a coherent and consistent approach to increasing the rate of student progress.
- Transform teaching, learning and assessment so that teachers provide engaging and relevant lessons that motivate students, allowing them to excel in their studies and develop a broad range of skills so that they are well prepared for their next step.
- Help teachers to develop their assessment skills so that they can measure student progress effectively and use the information this provides to develop lessons that are well matched to the needs and abilities of all students, including the most able.
- Gather and analyse information about the destinations of students more rigorously so that managers can judge whether the curriculum is appropriate and ensure that teachers are preparing students well for further study and employment.
- Improve students’ attendance and punctuality by improving the quality of lessons and through consistent and robust implementation of support arrangements.
- Make better use of the good relationships with local stakeholders to increase the number of students who participate in work-related learning, including meaningful work experience.
- Improve the effectiveness of governors in challenging leaders by:
- giving governors a clear picture of the college’s effectiveness through more frequent and accurate reporting of the extent of students’ progress and the quality of teaching, learning and assessment
- recruiting one or more governors with expertise in teaching, learning and assessment
- increasing the extent to which the board holds senior leaders and managers to account for the quality of teaching, learning and assessment.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that teaching and learning provides suitable and differentiated challenges to meet the varying needs of students with differing levels of prior attainment, so that those with high prior attainment, as well as low, can make excellent progress.
- Develop the curriculum to include qualifications at intermediate level for those who need incremental steps to prepare them for GCSE English and mathematics and ensure that staff place students on the most appropriate courses in these subjects to meet their development needs.
- Use progress coaches and the tutorial programme to set more challenging targets for students’ in order to
- ensure that all students, and particularly those with high prior attainment, make excellent progress
- develop students’ learning and employment behaviours and return attendance rates to earlier high levels.
- Make use of the recently developed systems for sharing good practice in teaching and learning within the college, and extend it beyond the college, in order to
- improve the extent to which teaching meets individual students’ needs
- help teachers incorporate equality and diversity into lessons more routinely
- enable teachers to promote and develop students’ mathematical skills across the curriculum more effectively
- ensure that all students, and particularly those with high prior attainment, make excellent progress.
- Identify clear priorities for action in quality improvement plans, monitor their implementation closely and keep detailed records of the progress made to ensure that improvements at the college continue.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that managers and teachers monitor students’ progress on AS level courses closely. In particular, for courses where there is a history of underperformance, managers at all levels should reinforce the importance of monitoring of assessment records and progress compared to predicted grades regularly.
- Raise teachers’ expectations of students’ potential for achievement. Support teachers to set students challenging targets, relative to their ability, in all learning activities and to be more demanding in ensuring students use these as their goals.
- Develop and strengthen teachers’ use of assessment during learning activities to enable them to make more frequent and more effective checks on students’ progress in learning and to ensure that students fully understand the main learning points.
- Support teachers to extend the range of teaching strategies they use and to match these carefully to the needs of different student groups. Support teachers to develop their skills in evaluating the success of their strategies in ensuring that learning is deepened and consolidated for all groups of students.
- Help teachers to increase their focus on subject learning beyond meeting minimum syllabus requirements by ensuring that they set clear learning objectives that cover the breadth and depth of learning in each topic or subject.
- Implement fully the revised arrangements for performance management. Ensure that managers evaluate the range of performance data available, including outcomes of lesson observations and success rates including for higher grades as well as the link to strategic objectives, to inform the performance management of all staff. Ensure that the resulting performance objectives set are demanding and measurable.
- Evaluate the quality of teaching, learning and assessment fully through self-assessment, taking full account of the range of learning activities that take place to support students. Ensure that analysis identifies and evaluates the factors that contribute to the quality of learning fully and use these to inform detailed actions for improvement.
- Put in place systems to share good practice across teaching teams, including in the promotion of equality and diversity matters.
- Ensure that the governing body receives training in equality and diversity as a matter of urgency. Make sure that governors review annually a detailed report on equality and diversity related to recruitment and staffing matters. Ensure actions to close achievement gaps are monitored closely
What does Gateway Sixth Form College need to do to improve further?
- Improve success rates in psychology at all levels by ensuring that all students have the potential to succeed on the course and are fully aware of the demands of the subject.
- Decrease the difference in success rates between students from a White background and those from minority ethnic backgrounds, by determining the main reasons behind their underachievement and taking appropriate actions.
- Improve the quality of teaching and learning across the subject area so that all students benefit from a wide range of enjoyable learning activities, enhanced by the very effective use of information and learning technology.
- Improve the consistency of individual learning plans and target setting so that all students find the review process beneficial and strive to meet challenging targets which assist their progress.
- Improve the validity of the self-assessment report and action plans so that managers give due emphasis to areas for improvement as well as to strengths.
What does Gateway Sixth Form college need to do to improve further?
- Continue to improve initial advice and guidance by subject specialists and to implement entry requirements more rigorously, so that more students have the potential to succeed and to gain higher grades.
- Improve lesson planning and teaching and learning so that all students receive enjoyable, challenging and interesting learning activities suited to their abilities.
- Improve target setting for students so that their learning plans are individualised and that each student is inspired to attain challenging aims.
- Increase the monitoring and the quality of lesson plans, individual learning plans, course reviews, quality improvement plans, target setting and self-assessment reports; so that they are realistic, objective and challenging and they genuinely drive improvements.
What does Gateway College need to do to improve further?
- Senior managers and governors should develop, as a matter of urgency, strategic objectives that will provide a framework for better informed operational planning at all levels in the college.
- Ensure that quality improvement procedures are applied rigorously in all curriculum areas to eliminate inconsistencies in performance and encourage a drive to improve standards further.
- Develop personal performance management at all levels in the college so that managers and teachers are aware of what they need to do to fulfil the college’s expectations.
- Ensure that challenging and realistic targets are set and monitored closely for all students in order that they reach their full potential and that individual student needs are addressed fully in all lessons.
- Ensure the revised arrangements for assessing students on entry are applied consistently so that all students are on courses where they can succeed and have their language, literacy and numeracy skills developed appropriately.
- Establish effective and comprehensive sharing of best practice in teaching and learning in order to secure consistently good teaching across all areas of the college.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- Low pass rates on some courses
- The proportion of high grade passes at GCE AS and A2
- The quality and effectiveness of group tutorials
- The sharing of good practice in teaching and learning
- The rigour of target-setting and review in action planning for improvement
What should be improved
- further development of the accommodation
- consistency of use of the results of initial and diagnostic assessment across the curriculum
- pass rates in key skills
- links with employers.
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