What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Leaders should ensure that teachers have high expectations of students to attend their lessons punctually. They should establish a consistent approach to rectifying poor punctuality so that students understand what is expected of them in all taught sessions.
- Teachers in vocational subjects should plan to improve students’ English and mathematical skills so that they understand how to apply these confidently within the vocational context. Teachers should ensure that students with high needs improve their skills in English and mathematics throughout their programmes.
- Managers and teachers should take further action to improve students’ attendance at English and mathematics lessons.
- Leaders and managers should ensure that employers in health and social care apprenticeships and in subcontracted provision have a good understanding of the requirements of apprenticeship programmes. They should monitor carefully that apprentices receive their entitlement to off-the-job training.
- Managers should ensure that students with high needs, adult students and apprentices receive detailed and helpful feedback on their work, so that they know what they need to do to improve.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Increase the proportion of learners on level 3 study programmes who achieve or exceed the grades expected of them relative to their prior attainment by ensuring that they have precise targets which teachers review frequently so they know how to improve.
- Improve learners’ attendance at lessons so that it is good in all curriculum areas, including English and mathematics, through the rigorous and consistent implementation of the college’s existing strategies.
- Improve the proportion of learners who achieve a grade C or above in GCSE qualifications in English and mathematics and who pass AS- and A-level courses by maintaining a focus on improving teaching and learning in these subjects.
- Improve the quality of provision for learners for whom the college receives high-needs funding by improving the partnership working with local authorities and the quality of education, health and care plans to ensure a smooth transition of new learners to the college, and provide better guidance to learners about their next steps on completion of their programme.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Build on the good teaching, learning and assessment by ensuring that teachers always plan lessons which have suitable pace and are appropriately demanding, so that students of all abilities reach their potential.
- Develop students’ skills further in English and mathematics, ensuring that these skills are reinforced and integrated appropriately into mainstream subjects.
- Ensure that questioning techniques always test students’ learning effectively and enable students’ thinking skills to be developed well so that students are able to probe subjects more deeply.
- Accelerate students’ progress by ensuring that students are actively involved in lessons, and by avoiding overly long teacher expositions. Use a range of strategies to stimulate students’ thinking and involvement from an early stage of lessons.
- Provide suitably detailed, precise and developmental feedback to students in all subjects so that all students can improve the quality of their work and make good progress.
- Ensure that teachers have sufficient understanding and confidence to promote equality and diversity more actively in lessons.
- Rigorously implement strategies to improve students’ attendance and punctuality in all subjects.
- Strengthen feedback to teachers, as part of the observation of teaching and learning, by ensuring a sharper focus on students’ learning rather than on the process of teaching.
What does Kingston College need to do to improve further?
- Improve students’ attainment in GCSE sciences and mathematics by helping teachers plan interesting and relevant activities and to set clear expectations for students’ behaviour and participation in lessons and standards of work.
- Ensure that the best practice in teaching and learning that exists in science and mathematics is used to help all teachers to raise the standards of students’ work.
- Ensure that progress tracking is fully integrated with students’ personal learning plans and that targets are specific and measurable to help students improve their achievement.
What does Kingston College need to do to improve further?
- Further train and enable teachers to use more varied, imaginative and active teaching strategies so that all students become more interested and involved in their lessons. Develop more nuanced questioning techniques and more stimulating teaching resources. Set more precise learning targets for students and help them evaluate their own progress towards them.
- Improve the way in which teachers and tutors enrol, teach and support GCE A-level students, develop their independent thinking and precisely monitor their progress, so that pass rates for these students continue to rise. Apply a similarly rigorous approach to apprenticeships, so that work-based learners’ achievement also continues to improve.
- Ensure that all subject and curriculum managers learn how to analyse data more intelligently to inform their continuous process of evaluative review.
- Ensure that managers set ambitious, but realistic, performance targets at course and faculty level, and monitor progress towards these assiduously. Model the best practices in writing curricular self-assessment reports so that they all attain similar levels of critical insight.
- Develop the capacity, expertise and resources to ensure that students who are identified as having a particular need receive the necessary additional learning support to help them reach their potential and increase their autonomy as learners. Evaluate systematically the impact on each student of the individual learning support they have received through their course.
- Raise the level of challenge and depth of scrutiny that governors bring to the college’s work. Provide them with timely access to data, curriculum updates, self-assessment reports and intelligence about the further education and skills sector so that they may play a full part in securing the college’s future educational results and financial health.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- the continued improvement needed in success rates, particularly at level 1 for adult learners
- low framework achievement in apprenticeships in sport and advanced apprenticeships in electrotechnical services
- learners’ poor attendance and punctuality
- poor key skills success rates
- inconsistent approaches to target setting and review
- the continued improvement needed in learners’ progress on AS and A2 courses from their starting points on entry
- the significant proportion of teaching that fails to meet the needs of individual learners
- limited work experience opportunities
- insufficient promotion and monitoring of equality and diversity
- insufficient sharing of good practice across the college
- the slow progress in addressing areas for improvement from the last inspection.
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What should be improved
- pass rates and retention rates in some subjects
- quality of some teaching
- data analysis as a basis for self-assessment
- quality assurance and its impact on raising standards
- students' attendance and lack of punctuality at lessons.
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