New College Swindon Inspection Recommendations

New College Swindon

Implement fully, actions to ensure that teachers promote good or better progress for all learners within and outside lessons by ensuring teachers:
- have consistently high expectations of all learners to encourage them to achieve their full potential
- focus specifically on skills development rather than the completion of tasks, providing feedback of a consistently high quality to learners on the standard of their work, so that they know more precisely what they need to do to improve their performance
- measure learners’ progress more frequently and thoroughly, and use challenging targets to help learners achieve their potential.
Reinforce clearly the expectations of vocational teachers in developing English skills across all subjects and support them to become confident and expert in these. Improve further learners’ English and mathematical skills through skilful use of vocational examples in learning and improve the teaching and learning of English by the specialist team.
Develop further the offer and increase the uptake of work experience so that all learners on vocational courses have a real experience of work.
Improve the way in which managers use the full range of data available to them to self-assess more accurately the relationship between outcomes data and the quality of teaching and learning.

The college should address:

reducing the number of learners who withdraw from part of their programme of study at AS level
the inconsistent progress made by learners aged 16 to 18 across the range of AS and A-level courses
lesson planning to meet all learners’ individual needs more fully
the rigour of procedures for deciding and moderating graded judgements about the quality of the college’s provision
the evaluation of learners’ performance data throughout the college’s provision to allow clearer benchmarking with other similar providers
improving the consistency of progress reviews and target-setting for all learners.