What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Continue to increase the proportion of students at level 3 who achieve or exceed the grades expected of them relative to their prior attainment by:
- raising further the skills of all teachers to enable them to plan and teach lessons that consistently and fully meet the needs of individual students
- making sure that all teachers provide learning at a level of challenge to help the most able students to make rapid progress.
- Leaders should improve the overall achievement rates of students on A-level courses, by ensuring that the number of students who remain on their course and take their examinations in this academic year remains high.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Governors and senior managers need to hasten the rate of improvement by acting quickly to raise all teachers’, curriculum managers’ and learners’ ambitions for what learners can achieve, and holding curriculum managers and teachers fully accountable for quickly improving standards.
- Improve significantly the proportion of learners who achieve or exceed their target grades by ensuring that teachers set challenging targets for learners and then carefully and frequently monitor learners’ progress towards achieving them. Ensure that teachers, when monitoring learners’ progress, concentrate on the extent to which learners improve their subject knowledge and understanding, and on ensuring that they know what they need to do to improve further.
- In English and mathematics, rapidly improve the proportion of learners who achieve the qualifications and skills they need. Ensure that teachers plan learning well to take account of what learners can and cannot already do in English and mathematics.
- Ensure that learners do frequent independent work for all their subjects, and that this work is demanding, marked rapidly and annotated with helpful feedback.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Drive up the quality of teaching, learning and assessment. Ensure that teachers plan lesson activities to challenge students of all abilities as much as possible; and use methods of questioning which involve all students and foster their deeper understanding.
- Ensure that success rates overall continue to improve, paying particular attention to the significant number of AS-level subjects where performance is poor, and to the often low proportion of higher pass grades.
- Ensure that all students reach a higher level of attainment than might be expected from their starting points when they join the college.
- Ensure that systems for monitoring and improving the quality of teaching focus on learning, the impact of assessment, and students’ progress. Rigorously analyse the strengths and weaknesses of lessons, and make sure that all managers use the analysis well to promote further improvement.
- Ensure that all teachers celebrate the college’s distinctive multicultural character when promoting equality and diversity in lessons, particularly when opportunities arise spontaneously.
- Implement fully a governors’ curriculum and standards committee so that the governors have more timely and detailed information on outcomes and the quality of provision, and the opportunity to evaluate the rigour and accuracy of the college’s self-assessment as well as their own.
- Revise the way in which the college carries out self-assessment so that it focuses more on what the college needs to do to improve its performance overall, particularly in relation to teaching, learning and leadership and management. Ensure that the grades given for key aspects more accurately reflect the most recent performance of the college.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- low GCSE English and mathematics success rates
- inconsistent focus on learning in lesson observation judgements.
What should be improved
- the contribution of the more reticent students during lessons
- self-critical element of self-assessment
- better use of students' views on their experience to drive improvement.
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