What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Leaders must evaluate fully the reasons why students leave their programme early. Leaders must take remedial action rapidly, so that more students remain on their programme and achieve their qualifications.
- Leaders must act swiftly to improve the quality of education in a small number of A-level science subjects, so that students complete their qualifications and achieve the high grades of which they are capable.
- Leaders should ensure that the personal coaching sessions that students receive meet students’ individual needs. Coaches need to work with students routinely to identify the broader skills they need to develop. Coaches must support students to develop these skills through better-quality teaching that interests all students.
- Leaders must ensure that all students know the full range of options available to them on completion of their studies. Leaders must share information on apprenticeships and employment with all students, so they are better informed about their next steps.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment by ensuring that all teachers:
- plan and use activities that take account of students’ starting points and prior learning, and challenge students so that they make rapid progress and achieve their full potential
- develop effective in-class assessment strategies that quickly identify the depth of students’ understanding, and enable immediate interventions to correct errors and close gaps in students’ knowledge
- set consistently high expectations of what students can achieve, and support all students to make good or better progress
- share the better practice that exists in the few more successful subjects to ensure that students experience the same high quality of learning in all subjects.
- Leaders should ensure that their self-assessment is self-critical and accurately identifies areas for improvement. They should ensure that managers fully and consistently implement actions to address identified weaknesses.
- Leaders should ensure that curriculum managers take effective actions to address the achievement gaps between different groups of students.
- Managers should ensure that teachers reinforce fundamental British values in lessons and tutorials so that students’ understanding of how these relate to their daily lives is improved.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- In order to enable all students to achieve to their full potential, ensure that teachers consistently:
- plan and deliver interesting and challenging learning activities which are matched to students’ individual needs, and inspire them to become independent learners
- use the full range of student information, including initial assessment of literacy and numeracy, to plan learning activities, set challenging targets and monitor progress.
- Further develop the learning culture for staff by ensuring:
- the feedback to all staff following lesson observations is sufficiently clear and detailed to enable them to understand how to secure improvement
- develop electronic learning materials to enable staff to work independently to improve their practice
- build on and share the existing good practice that exists within the college.
- Strengthen the strategies for closing the achievement gap that exists for some groups of students.
What does The Sixth Form College, Solihull need to do to improve further?
- Develop the ability of staff to identify and cultivate students’ language and mathematical skills so that students make quicker progress and are better supported in achieving high grades.
- Increase the proportion of good and outstanding lessons by improving the quality of lesson planning and ensuring that teaching addresses the learning needs of students more accurately.
- Ensure that the implementation of recommended actions from teaching and learning observations is monitored well to bring about improvements to classroom practice.
- Ensure rigorous monitoring of action plans and data to identify areas for improvement, so that planned actions have a more consistent impact on the provision and outcomes for students.
- Refine the process whereby feedback can be given promptly to students when they make suggestions for improvements so that they know that the college is listening to them and so that the profile of students’ views is raised.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- a few AS levels with below average success rates
- a minority of vocational courses with below average success rates
- target setting and the monitoring of students’ progress using the electronic individual learning plan.
What should be improved
- performance of students compared to their prior attainment in some subjects
- punctuality of some students
- quality of art studios and science laboratories
- A* to C pass rates on GCSE English and mathematics courses.
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