What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Increase the proportion of students achieving merit and distinction grades, particularly on extended diploma courses in art and design and music, by:
- ensuring all teachers are skilled in providing sufficiently challenging activities and are adept in using probing questions to elicit thoughtful responses from students and to deepen their understanding of key topics
- sharing the existing good practice in teaching and assessment across all teachers in the college to increase the proportion of outstanding teaching, learning and assessment.
- Collate a more comprehensive analysis of students’ destinations, particularly in following up outcomes for those progressing to employment and those taking a gap year.
- Maintain the strength of focus on actions for quality improvement to embed the culture and staff collective responsibility for continuous quality improvement throughout the college.
What does Hereford College of Arts need to do to improve further?
- Increase the proportion of learners achieving high grades and exceeding current expectations by setting and monitoring more demanding targets and providing more stretch and challenge in lessons.
- Raise the quality of teaching and learning by strengthening the rigour of the lesson observation process, ensuring that actions for improvement are explicit and that monitoring is diligent.
- Improve all learners’ English language and mathematical skills by ensuring that they have the opportunity to study functional skills and that success rates increase.
- Ensure that all learners benefit from opportunities to develop their knowledge and understanding of personal, social and cultural diversity through a more consistent approach to high quality group tutorials.
- Ensure the rigorous and effective implementation of the performance management system and the associated staff development, so that all staff benefit from an annual appraisal and are enabled to work more effectively to improve the quality of provision for their learners.
- Ensure that the self-assessment reports at all levels include the most important issues and that graded judgements correlate with, and are supported by, valid and realistic strengths and areas for improvement.
What does Hereford College of Arts need to do to improve further?
- Urgently raise success rates on performing arts courses by rigorously monitoring learner attendance and progress and by ensuring robust curriculum management uses data and targets to monitor closely and improve the quality of provision.
- Raise retention rates by further improving initial advice and guidance to ensure all learners are adequately prepared for the academic challenge of courses and are fully aware of course expectations and requirements. Rigorously monitor learner attendance and progress and provide additional support where required.
- Share existing good practice in teaching and learning more widely within and between different course teams so that teaching and learning are consistently good or better across all courses. Promote and enforce high professional standards in all lessons to reflect industry best practice.
- Ensure learners are sufficiently challenged in all lessons by supporting teachers to plan demanding work that is well matched to meet individual learners’ needs and ability levels. Ensure teachers target questions effectively to challenge all learners and develop their potential fully.
- Ensure all learners that are identified as requiring additional support receive it by promoting the beneficial impact of support on previous learners’ successes. Extend the support provided for learners with numeracy development needs by providing specialist support to enable learners to achieve their full potential.
- Significantly strengthen the rigour of academic performance monitoring by setting and rigorously monitoring challenging targets for learner attendance, retention, achievement and success on every course. Take robust timely action to address underperformance against targets by implementing recovery plans.
- Significantly enhance the effectiveness of quality assurance and quality improvement processes, including those for the observation of teaching and learning, by adopting best practice from outstanding providers within the sector.
- Ensure governors review and approve college safeguarding policies and procedures and that they receive reports relating to the implementation of safeguarding and equalities schemes. Strengthen governors’ knowledge and understanding of data to enable them to provide more effective challenge.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- some poor accommodation
- underdeveloped employer engagement
- low take-up of additional learning support
- some aspects of college-wide monitoring and target setting.
What should be improved
- attendance and punctuality of students
- unsatisfactory accommodation
- retention rates of adult students on level 3 courses
- pass rates for key skills application of number
- consistency of analysis and evaluation of college provision
- central co-ordination of staff development.
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