What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Leaders and managers should ensure that the starting points for all apprentices are accurately assessed and are used to inform learning plans that challenge apprentices and support them to make the progress of which they are capable.
- Leaders and managers should identify apprentices’ English and mathematics skill levels promptly at the start of their apprenticeship and provide relevant training to support their continued development.
- Leaders and managers should continue to refine the monitoring of apprentices’ progress to ensure that all apprentices make good progress towards completing their apprenticeship by the expected completion date.
- Leaders should ensure that learners in receipt of high-needs funding are able to participate in a broader range of work experience activities, to enable them to gain a wider understanding of opportunities available to them in the world of work.
What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Leaders should set higher expectations of teaching quality and support managers and staff to improve curriculum design, planning and teaching, so that learners achieve the grades of which they are capable.
- Too few learners and apprentices make good progress and achieve their English and mathematics GSCE qualifications. Leaders must ensure that learners attend these sessions.
- Leaders and managers should ensure that teachers provide learners and apprentices with effective feedback so that they develop their skills, knowledge and behaviours according to their potential.
- Leaders need to ensure that learners who have high needs benefit from the new supported internship programme and can gain experience of work to help them decide on their future options.
- Leaders must ensure that apprentices know specifically the threats posed locally from those with radical or extremist views.
- Governors must ensure that leaders’ improvement actions lead quickly to learners and apprentices knowing more and achieving their best.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Governors should hold the new leadership team to account relentlessly for the improvement of the quality of teaching, learning and assessment, leading to a rapid and sustainable improvement in learners’ progress and achievement.
- Leaders should improve learners’ attendance and increase the proportion of learners and apprentices who achieve their qualifications by ensuring that:
- managers use information about learners’ progress and the outcomes of lesson observations to identify accurately what individual teachers need to do to improve their performance
- managers resolve staffing shortages swiftly, particularly in English and mathematics, so that learners have consistency in the staff who teach them.
- Managers should improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment by:
- ensuring that staff accurately assess their learners’ starting points and use this information to plan and teach lessons that motivate and engage all learners and support them to make good or better progress
- ensuring that teachers provide helpful feedback and challenging targets for their learners, so that they can improve the quality of their work and make good progress
- enabling staff to improve their confidence, knowledge and skills to teach and promote the value of English and mathematics effectively. Teachers should increase the proportion of learners who make good progress in developing their English and mathematical skills by:
- improving the quality of teaching, learning and assessment in English and mathematics lessons – using opportunities in vocational lessons to develop learners’ English and mathematics skills.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that all teachers set the highest expectations for learners’ attendance and punctuality. Implement fully the procedures for recording, monitoring and improving attendance at lessons, particularly in English and mathematics.
- Ensure that teachers have the skills to encourage learners to develop and practise their English and mathematics skills in vocational courses to support them in achieving their qualifications.
- Enable teachers to ensure that the least and most able achieve their potential in lessons.
- Improve the assessment and recording of learners’ progress during lessons by ensuring the regular monitoring of learners’ performance and the accurate and timely recording of what learners have achieved.
- Improve teaching, learning and assessment by ensuring that managers who observe focus clearly on the impact of teaching on learning, and on the progress that learners make in class; train observers in writing clear and precise actions for improvement for teachers which enable managers to carry out appropriate monitoring of their development.
- Ensure that managers implement, monitor and evaluate more rigorously and carefully agreed actions to improve the apprenticeship provision, so that all apprentices make good progress in their learning.
- Improve trainers’ and assessors’ use of the information of apprentices’ prior attainment to plan effective learning programmes
- Ensure that employer-based apprentices get appropriate access to learning resources to help them achieve within agreed timescales.
- Enable governors to have a more precise understanding of the quality of the provision and what needs improving so that they may support and challenge leaders and managers more fully to accelerate the improvement of the provision.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Improve the provision in building and construction and foundation English by raising tutors’ expectations of learners to ensure they are challenged in their learning and make the progress expected of them in order to raise standards and increase success rates.
- Improve achievement rates in functional skills and high grades in GCSE English and mathematics by:
- ensuring that learners are grouped according to ability
- ensuring that learners join classes early in their courses
- improving teaching so that it stimulates and engages learners and ensuring that the range of teaching and learning strategies meets the needs of all learners
- improving attendance and behaviour in the minority of classes where they are an issue.
- Increase the proportion of learners completing their apprenticeships by setting specific and measurable targets for learners, regularly and systematically analysing data to identify causes for non-achievement and rigorously monitoring improvement strategies to assess the impact they have on success rates.
- Ensure staff have high enough expectations of learners and challenge them to attain the high grades they are capable of, and share good practice from curriculum areas that have a high proportion of learners achieving high grades.
- Increase the proportion of outstanding teaching and learning by:
- rigorously implementing the ‘Stoke Approach’ framework to course delivery in all curriculum areas
- sharing good practice within the college to bring consistency across all subject areas
- sharing good practice of ‘Beacon’ status staff across all subject areas
- consolidating the use of questioning techniques to ensure that learning is regularly checked and all learners are sufficiently challenged in their learning.
What does Stoke-on-Trent College need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that the impact of strategies to improve retention are closely monitored so that adult success rates match those of learners aged 16 to 18.
- Further develop teaching and learning so that all lessons achieve the same high quality, with full engagement of learners, brisk pace and effective checking of learning.
- Further develop the system for the monitoring of teaching and learning to ensure there is a clear focus on the promotion of learning and all reports accurately reflect grades.
- Ensure that more robust self-assessment and quality improvement processes are sustained and that actions being taken to improve underperforming courses are effective.
- Ensure that curriculum teams closely monitor the progress of groups of learners, set clear targets, and take prompt action to address differences so that gaps in achievement diminish rapidly.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- low success and retention rates by learners aged 16-18 on levels 2 and 3 provision
- insufficient structured collection and analysis of employers’ feedback.
What should be improved
- retention and pass rates at level 3
- teaching and assessment of key skills
- unsuitable accommodation and specialist facilities in some areas
- use of information learning technology (ILT) in teaching and learning.
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