What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Ensure that teachers challenge those students who arrive late for their lessons and encourage those students with poor attendance to attend their lessons more frequently.
- Support all teachers to plan the delivery of their subject and curriculum in a way that enables students to build on their prior knowledge, retain and recall previous learning, and make rapid progress.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Governors and leaders must ensure that plans to bring about improvements are clear, identify precise targets for improvement, and state clearly who will be held accountable for achieving them.
- With leaders of the college, governors must review and improve the information that they receive about all aspects of college performance, in particular that relating to students’ progress and achievement, so that they can challenge and support leaders effectively to bring about necessary improvements to the quality of teaching, learning and assessment and students’ outcomes.
- Leaders and managers must take action to ensure that teachers are held to account for the progress that students make in the subjects they teach, so that:
- teachers plan high-quality learning activities that support and challenge a much higher proportion of students to achieve their potential
- the proportion of students who achieve high grades in A-level subjects improves significantly.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Improve aspects of teaching and learning by:
- consistently setting high expectations for all students, so that they make consistently good progress and achieve high grades
- giving clear instructions to all students so that they know what they have to do to be successful
- making better use of opportunities in lessons to develop mathematical skills appropriate to the subject they are studying
- giving students time to discuss equality and diversity in lessons so that their knowledge and awareness increases.
- Improve the form and content of the college self-assessment report to ensure that there is adequate coverage of all aspects of the college’s work supported by sound evidence. Ensure that the elements of areas for improvement are sufficiently detailed so that specific actions can be identified to support rapid improvement in provision.
What does Thomas Rotherham College need to do to improve further?
- Improve the proportion of students who achieve high grades and fulfil their potential by reviewing the content of lessons, learning materials and assessment activities in the lower-performing subjects. Raise standards by ensuring that the outcomes of this review lead to a consistent improvement in the breadth and depth of students’ learning in these subjects.
- Make better use of data in quality assurance and self-assessment to develop strategies to identify swiftly and intervene effectively where the performance of individuals and groups of students is below expectations. Ensure that such interventions lead to consistently high success rates in all subjects.
- Improve arrangements for the performance management of teachers and managers. Strengthen accountability arrangements so that all staff recognise fully their responsibility for performance in their area.
- Improve the rigour and consistency of target-setting at all levels, and ensure that ambitious targets for all aspects of the college’s work are linked coherently to strategic priorities and communicated unambiguously throughout the college. Implement rigorous procedures for monitoring progress against these targets.
- Ensure that college leaders are successful in creating a shared culture of continuous improvement across the college that is focused relentlessly on raising expectations.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- low success rates on a minority of subjects
- insufficient measures to improve the quality of teaching
- the quality of curriculum management
- the promotion of equality and diversity within the curriculum
- the lack of compliance with safeguarding requirements.
What should be improved
- low pass rates on advanced subsidiary-level (AS-level) courses
- achievement of high grades
- the overall quality of teaching and learning
- the use of individual learning plans to set targets and monitor student progress
- the rigour of self-assessment
- arrangements for quality assurance
- the sharing of good practice
- governors monitoring of students' performance and experience
- the college response to Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 (SENDA) and the Race Relations (amendment) Act 2000.
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