What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- All staff and governors should maintain the focus and momentum of quality improvement initiatives to consolidate progress and establish higher standards of provision.
- Teachers should instil in all students suitable behaviour and attitudes to learning, to enable them to make better progress. In particular they should:
- adopt a more consistent approach with students who are absent and late, or arrive to lessons without the required equipment
- ensure that students remove any physical barriers that might prevent them engaging fully in lessons, in particular coats, hats, hoods and bags
- adopt and enforce a cross-college approach and set of expectations as to how students maintain their folders and/or notebooks, to ensure that they compile an orderly and comprehensive record from which they can revise effectively.
- Teachers should ensure that they plan lessons that engage and motivate students more, and cater appropriately for the wide range of abilities, so that all students are able to make good progress.
- Managers should significantly increase the opportunities students have to do work experience, to support the development of their work-related skills.
- Managers should focus resources in particular on those more poorly performing subject areas, to ensure that the staff teams have the development, guidance and support they need to raise standards in those areas.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Leaders, managers and governors must ensure that the recently implemented college improvement plan is rigorously applied in all areas of the college’s work and that they review progress regularly against targets set, and take urgent action where insufficient progress is being made.
- Managers and teachers should use data on students’ performance more effectively to develop a sharper understanding of individuals’ progress and to set more specific and challenging targets for students to help them make better and faster progress.
- Improve the quality and effectiveness of teaching and learning and students’ progress by:
- ensuring that all teachers plan and use appropriate activities and resources in lessons to meet the different abilities of all students, and provide sufficient challenge for most-able students
- improving teachers’ skills in using questioning more effectively to probe and check students’ depth of understanding and to help students to extend and apply their knowledge
- ensuring that teachers’ marking and assessment of students’ work provides sufficiently detailed feedback to help students know how to improve their work and increase their progress
- sharing the existing good practice evident in the better performing subjects so that teachers, especially those most in need of improvement, are supported to reflect on, and improve, their own practice.
- Maintain and accelerate current actions designed to improve students’ development of skills in, and achievement of, GCSE and functional skills qualifications in English and mathematics. Ensure that all teachers have the skills and confidence to integrate and develop English and especially mathematics in their own subjects.
- Ensure that recent actions taken to improve students’ attendance and punctuality are sustained and implemented rigorously and consistently across the college. Increase the expectations on students of regular attendance and good punctuality.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Build upon the good quality of teaching, learning and assessment by ensuring that questioning techniques always test learning effectively, develop learning rigorously and facilitate the deeper probing of subjects. Ensure that the learning of all students is checked fully in lessons and that questioning techniques do not allow a minority of students to provide all of the responses to questions. Target and compose questions skilfully so that students’ learning and thinking skills and their ability to analyse topics critically are better developed.
- Ensure that planning for lessons is always thorough so that strategies for learning meet the needs of individual students fully and provide appropriate levels of pace and challenge. Share good practice in teaching, learning and assessment effectively between teachers so that all lessons are at least good.
- Accelerate students’ progress by avoiding overly long teacher expositions and ensuring that students are fully involved in lessons. Integrate opportunities for students to participate actively throughout lessons by using a range of strategies to stimulate their thinking, involvement and contribution from an early stage.
- Promote the development of specialist vocabulary, English and mathematics appropriately so that it is good in all lessons. Raise the proportion of students gaining functional skills qualifications or high grades in GCSE mathematics and English.
- Ensure that planning to improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment is clear and robust at curriculum level. Ensure that strengths and areas for improvement in lessons are analysed thoroughly in subject areas and that planning for improvement is stronger at that level.
What does Sir George Monoux College need to do to improve further?
- Improve success rates, especially in GCSE mathematics and AS sciences, by making sure that all lessons are planned to include well-judged, differentiated activities that take into account students’ levels of literacy and prior attainment.
- Make sure that all students have opportunities to demonstrate what they have learned and deepen their understanding by their inclusion in informal assessments, such as during question and answer sessions.
What does Sir George Monoux College need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that all students are placed on courses where they can succeed, reach their full potential and benefit from appropriate literacy support.
- Improve the arrangements for the observation of teaching so that there is a real focus on evaluating learning. Support staff to develop stimulating and challenging lessons and to share existing good practice so that their teaching has a demonstrable impact on students’ progress.
- Use the self-assessment process more effectively to identify weaknesses at an early stage so that swift action can be taken to minimise any negative impact on student outcomes.
- Analyse carefully why so many students fail to achieve their predicted grade at AS level and take urgent steps to improve outcomes for present and future students on these programmes.
- Resolve long-standing staffing issues so that students are not adversely affected by ongoing instability.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- the consistently low success rates of some courses
- teaching that fails to meet the individual needs of learners
- quality assurance procedures lacking rigour and not incorporating the views of learners
- the poor quality and management of tutorials
- insufficient monitoring and evaluation by managers.
What should be improved
- retention rates, value added and pass rates on some courses
- learning support
- sharing of best practice across college departments
- uptake of enrichment activities
- students' punctuality.
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