What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Leaders and managers should continue to implement their well-conceived strategies to further improve the proportion of students who achieve their qualifications.
- Managers should ensure that more students and apprentices are able to improve their skills in English and mathematics and achieve their GCSE qualifications, in line with their specific targets.
- Leaders and managers should further improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment in the small minority of lessons where students make insufficiently rapid progress by ensuring that:
- teachers provide sufficient challenge to the most able students, so that they make good progress and achieve or exceed their target grades
- all students and apprentices are set aspirational targets, taking into account their starting points.
- Managers should continue to increase opportunities for external work experience placements for vocational students, particularly for those at level 2, so that they are able to learn about and experience work in their vocational area. This should include increasing the number of supported internships for students in receipt of high-needs funding.
- Managers should take effective steps to ensure that students’ attendance improves further, across all subjects, to increase their opportunities to make good progress.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Improve attendance through the consistent application of high expectations and making students fully aware of its importance to aid their progress and as an employability skill.
- Increase significantly the number of students on English and mathematics courses at levels 1 and 2 who achieve their qualifications and high grades at GCSE in both subjects; ensure that teachers prepare students fully for the exam and all vocational teachers effectively incorporate English and mathematics into their lessons.
- Increase the effectiveness of teaching and learning by fully assessing all students understanding in lessons, setting students challenging targets to achieve and giving them comprehensive feedback on coursework.
- Make more effective use of available information about students’ prior knowledge and progress throughout the course to plan lessons that meet their differing needs and abilities.
- Develop courses throughout the college further so that they meet the requirements of study programmes fully.
- Implement further actions to maintain the improvements made to apprenticeships in all subject areas and to ensure that all apprentices complete their training in the timescales planned for them when they started their apprenticeship.
- Establish fully the lesson observation process to ensure that all teachers make sustained improvements and that the quality of teaching and learning is at least good.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that the lesson observation programme is accurate and provides teachers with clear and effective guidance to help them improve in order to raise the standard of teaching, learning and assessment across all subject areas.
- Increase the pace of improvement in teaching, learning and assessment in order to secure good outcomes for students.
- Set higher expectations and standards for students’ punctuality, attendance and learning behaviours to improve their readiness for learning and students’ attainment.
- Ensure that all students are set targets and challenged effectively in lessons to enable them to make good progress and achieve high standards.
- Ensure that all students’ work is assessed and returned promptly, with detailed feedback that helps students improve and make better progress.
- Ensure that teachers routinely develop the English and mathematical skills of students during lessons to equip them for their studies and life beyond college.
- Make better use, in lessons, of opportunities for developing and extending students’ understanding of equality and diversity.
- Monitor apprenticeship provision more closely and provide timely support and interventions that ensure apprentices make good progress and complete their awards.
What does Milton Keynes College need to do to improve further?
- Raise learners’ attainment, especially in AS-level and GCSE courses, by ensuring that all lessons are planned to meet the full range of learners’ needs and abilities and engage learners’ interests.
- Help learners to become more independent in their learning by setting measurable, short-term targets for them and ensuring they are completed.
What does Milton Keynes College need to do to improve further?
- Share the good practice in teaching and learning so that all teachers are able to plan for and provide stimulating and challenging activities that match the needs of all learners in the group.
- Provide further encouragement for teachers to extend the potential for learning by greater use of ILT in the classroom and in the development of learners’ independence of their teachers.
- Share good practice in assessment so that all teachers provide clear guidance for learners about how to improve at all stages of their programme. Draw on the excellent practice in hairdressing and beauty therapy to improve the quality of individual learning plans and action planning to provide more value to learners and help them to improve specific aspects of their performance.
- Improve procedures to develop learners’ understanding of equality, diversity and safeguarding during work-based learning reviews and ensure that teachers implement the guidance on promoting equality and diversity in lessons.
- Explore working more collaboratively with local school sixth forms and the local authority to enhance the range and quality of AS- and A-level provision.
- Increase the rigour, range and consistency of quality assurance processes; develop specific and measurable ways to enable the impact on individual learners of advice, guidance and learning support to be evaluated.
- Sharpen the effectiveness of performance monitoring by setting and recording more precise targets and actions for improvement.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- the variation in success rates and the improvement of success rates in all areas
- the further improvement of success rates for black and minority ethnic heritage students
- unsatisfactory aspects of teaching and learning and the need to further increase the proportion of good and better lessons
- low key skills success rates.
Areas for improvement
- low apprenticeship framework achievement
- declining retention and achievement in AS and A level Sociology
- insufficient planning for individual learning needs
- low success rates for many AS and A level subjects particularly in AS environmental science
- lack of differentiated activities to stretch the more able learners
- insufficient use of value added data to drive improvement for individual learners
- ineffective monitoring of the impact of improvement strategies
- insufficient breadth of provision to meet all learners’ needs in science
What should be improved
- pass and retention rates on many advanced subsidiary-level (AS-level) and general certificate of education advanced-level (GCE A-level) courses, IT courses for adults and English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) courses
- completion rates of apprenticeship frameworks
- attendance of students at lessons
- teaching and learning in some curriculum areas, particularly for 16 to18 year olds
- development of key skills
- rigour of course review and self-assessment
- management of sixth form centre provision
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