What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Improve teaching and learning so that those teachers who do not yet make productive use of lesson time to teach subject knowledge and skills receive appropriate training and support to do so.
- Ensure that all students who do not plan to go university receive timely and relevant advice and guidance about the opportunities available to them when they leave college.
- Implement the work experience strategy so that all relevant students benefit from suitable work experience and work-related learning related to the subjects they study and to their career aims.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Managers should take swift action to make sure students’ attendance improves across all subjects.
- Managers should ensure that more students on study programmes develop work-related skills by completing meaningful work experience or work-related activities.
- Leaders and managers should take swift action to make sure all students make the progress of which they are capable and achieve their qualifications.
- Leaders and managers should improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment by:
- ensuring that all teachers plan and deliver interesting and challenging lessons to meet the needs and abilities of all students
- ensuring that students achieve their potential by setting them ambitious targets, closely monitoring their progress and intervening where progress is slow
- ensuring that teachers check learning more frequently and effectively.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Governors, leaders and managers must ensure that the improvement actions already in place are accelerated to make sure that students’ attainment and progress on all courses are consistently good or better.
- Managers should improve teaching, learning and assessment further, by:
- ensuring that teachers set work in lessons that is suitably demanding and complex, in particular for students following level 3 programmes and for the most able
- improving teachers’ understanding of how to measure and improve students’ progress by sharing good practice
- ensuring that feedback to students is more consistently useful in helping them to improve their work, and that more teachers are checking that students carry out the actions that they recommend
- developing further the range and effectiveness of strategies that teachers use in lessons to check students’ learning
- ensuring that the evaluation of teaching and learning focuses more on the progress that students make, both in the lesson and over time, and the standards of work that they produce
- further improving students’ attendance, particularly in English and mathematics lessons.
- Leaders and managers need to ensure that judgements within the college’s self-assessment reports are suitably self-critical and more evidence-based, providing a sound basis on which to move forward.
- Ensure that level 2 students, particularly those who will not be progressing to further study in the college, benefit from meaningful work experience at a suitable point in their programme to enable them to make informed decisions about their next steps and career options, and prepare them for future employment.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Set realistic, achievable performance targets throughout the college, and ensure all managers plan and carry out the actions necessary to achieve these within their area of responsibility.
- Enrol students who have achieved lower grades in their English or mathematics GCSE on a qualification that they can achieve and that prepares them to progress onto a GCSE when they are ready to study for a higher grade.
- Extend work-related activities to all students so that they are well equipped to progress into employment.
- Develop better links with employers in order to secure work-related activities and to inform the college’s continued development of a curriculum that develops the skills students need to gain employment.
- Increase the range and effectiveness of teaching and learning methods that teachers use to develop students’ higher order thinking skills. Ensure all teachers plan to meet individual students’ needs by setting clear learning objectives that are achieved through the activities in which students take part during lessons.
- Provide staff with training to ensure that they develop the confidence to plan lessons that celebrate and develop students’ understanding of diversity.
- Set clear expectations for all staff about students’ attendance at lessons and ensure all staff are using effective strategies to help students meet these expectations.
What does Taunton’s College need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that students’ learning is improved through providing training to teachers in assessment for learning techniques to promote independent learning activities in lessons and more productive feedback to students on their work.
- Increase the impact of internal lesson observations on improving teaching and learning by sharpening the focus of feedback on key areas for development.
- Ensure the rigour and consistency of target setting so that all students are set targets that are clear and precise and enable them to make faster progress.
- Ensure that leaders and managers at all levels continue to be highly visible and unrelenting in their focus on raising standards and expectations in every aspect of college life, and that all staff and students recognise that it is in all of their interests to play their own part in the pursuit of excellence.
- Where individual students or courses are underperforming, improve the impact of self-assessment by ensuring that all staff are trained to recognise the contribution of teaching and course management to such weaker performance. Arising from this, develop tightly-focused improvement plans to improve provision.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- retention rates
- achievement rates at AS level
- access to ICT facilities for teaching and learning
- GCSE mathematics provision
- achievement rates on key skills qualifications.
What should be improved?
- pass rates on advanced subsidiary-level (AS-level) courses
- financial stability of the college
- clarity of targets included in students' individual learning plans
- accommodation for advice and guidance, social areas for students and library space
- grading of internal lesson observations
- students' achievements of key skills.
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