What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Leaders must ensure that all apprenticeship programmes are designed to ensure that apprentices develop significant new knowledge, skills and behaviours over the course of their programmes and that their learning is linked well with their role in the workplace.
- Leaders must ensure the work that all learners and apprentices are given to complete is sufficiently demanding to provide them with the opportunity to achieve their best.
- Leaders must ensure that governors receive appropriately robust information on all incidents related to safeguarding to allow them to hold leaders to account effectively.
- Leaders must ensure that all learners’ and apprentices’ understanding of topics related to life in modern Britain is well developed and that they know how to protect themselves from extremist activity.
- Leaders must focus on tackling the below-target attendance across the college, with a sharp focus on the minority of courses where attendance is particularly low.
- Leaders must ensure that all learners and apprentices receive useful information on the potential careers available to them upon completion of their course to enable them to make an informed decision about their next steps.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Consistently ensure that all teachers and assessors use the outcomes of students’ and apprentices’ initial assessment of their starting points to plan teaching, learning and assessment activities which meet their specific needs and potential, so that they may make the progress of which they are capable.
- Ensure that the individual targets and actions set for students and apprentices, as well as teachers’ and assessors’ feedback on marked work, are sufficiently detailed and precise, so that they know what they need to do to improve further.
- Develop teachers’ practice in challenging and inspiring students and apprentices to ensure that they make consistently good or better progress in lessons and increase their confidence to learn independently to achieve their full potential.
- Increase the range of opportunities for students and apprentices to develop confidently their English and mathematical skills for their chosen careers by making sure that all teachers and assessors pay close attention to promoting high standards in spelling, punctuation and grammar and the skilful use of numeracy in their work.
- Ensure that teachers routinely promote to all students the importance of high attendance at all scheduled English and mathematics sessions.
- Ensure that leaders and managers routinely collect and analyse the destinations of all students and apprentices and compare these with their intended destinations. Investigate where gaps exist and develop suitably challenging actions to ensure that the curriculum matches local and regional needs.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- In order to make leadership, management and governance more effective in improving learners’ and apprentices’ progress from their starting points and in the achievement of their qualifications:
- ensure that the governing body has sufficient expertise and experience to oversee ongoing improvements in teaching, learning and assessment and outcomes
- ensure that governors work effectively with leaders and managers to ensure that the college has a clear strategic direction and a culture of excellence at all levels
- ensure that governors have a clear and accurate picture of the college’s effectiveness and hold leaders and managers robustly to account for learners’ and apprentices’ progress and achievement
- ensure that leaders and managers provide all staff with accurate, accessible and timely management information
- use performance management effectively to tackle underperformance in all areas of the college by setting clear targets for teaching linked to improving teaching practice through professional development activities
- increase significantly the proportion of learners who gain their qualifications; ensure that they make very good progress and achieve challenging target grades
- improve the planning and delivery of the apprenticeship programmes, so that apprentices make rapid progress and achieve their qualification framework on time
- improve the quality of teaching and learning in discrete English and mathematics lessons, so that learners on 16 to 19 study programmes and adults who have not previously attained GCSE English and/or mathematics at grades A* to C improve their GCSE grades and develop their skills in English and mathematics to prepare them for employment or higher levels of study
- foster a culture of high expectations for all learners and apprentices and equip teachers with the skills they need to: incorporate and develop learners’ English and mathematics skills in all lessons; plan and deliver lessons to challenge, inspire and meet learners’ individual needs; assess learning effectively so that they are able to identify what each learner has learned and make appropriate and timely improvement interventions; provide detailed feedback that helps learners to improve, and set and monitor sufficiently challenging targets to promote learners’ rapid progress
- develop clear and robust mechanisms to substantially improve learners’ attendance and ensure managers intervene effectively to promote greater engagement by learners and apprentices in all learning settings.
What does Telford College of Arts and Technology need to do to improve further?
- Increase students’ success rates and their progress on advanced level courses by ensuring that students have the potential to succeed at this level and receive the academic support and challenge they need.
- Ensure that all students attain at high levels by determining the causes of any consistent underperformance by any group of students and by taking action to resolve these concerns.
- Increase retention and attendance rates by the consistent use of strategies to track those students at risk of withdrawal.
- Ensure the completion of college data returns is in accordance with current guidance so that managers use data as reliable measures of performance to aid self-assessment and improvement planning.
- Implement the developing improvements to the quality assurance arrangements, including the revised self-assessment process, to enable the comprehensive and robust evaluation and improvement of all aspects of provision.
- Review the training and guidance to teachers and lesson observers to ensure that the awareness of cultural and linguistic diversities becomes an embedded feature of teaching, training and assessment. Clarify the awareness of the differences between equal opportunity, inclusiveness and diversity.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- aspects of the internal observation system
- the precision of action plans and targets
- self-assessment for governors.
n/a
What should be improved
- declining retention rates
- inadequate additional learning support for part-time students
- ineffective management and quality assurance arrangements for modern apprentice programmes
- some unsatisfactory course reviews
- insufficiently thorough verification of assessment.
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