Newbury College Inspection Recommendations

Newbury College

Ensure high quality target setting and frequent progress monitoring for all students.
Ensure all teachers provide precise and informative written and oral feedback that clearly tells students how they can improve and make better progress.
Provide high quality training and guidance to teachers so that they have the skills and confidence to teach English and mathematics in level 1 and level 2 functional skills lessons and in vocational settings so that students achieve their functional skills qualifications and successfully improve the standard of their literacy and numeracy.
Review and enforce strategies to ensure high attendance in all subject areas.
Ensure staff development and improvement activities closely align to those weaker aspects of teaching, learning and assessment identified through lesson observation, and also focus on techniques that will raise the quality of teaching, learning and assessment from good to outstanding.
Explore and implement arrangements to analyse, track and monitor accurately the progress students make relative to their starting points.

Encourage teachers to better plan the activities of support assistants, making it clear which activities, individuals or groups need help. Review the college allocation of learning support assistants or volunteers and arrange to monitor their activities to ensure that all are used to a consistently high standard.
Identify more clearly what is to be learned in lessons. Develop engaging ways to check that learning has taken place, including precise and directed open questioning of learners. Plan a sufficient range of tasks to challenge the more able and to motivate and keep the interest of the whole group.
Ensure that the findings from observations of lessons capture more precisely the key areas for improvement and that action-planning for teachers is sufficiently focused to lead to clear and measurable improvement.
Emphasise to teachers that the promotion of equality and diversity should be a routine part of all areas of the curriculum, to enable all learners to develop their awareness of these matters. Monitor this as part of lesson observations and clearly identify ways for individual teachers to improve.
Develop arrangements to better include franchise and subcontracted providers in the quality review process. Ensure that all aspects of the performance of subcontracted provision, particularly Train to Gain, are fully and routinely reviewed.

The college should address: