What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Improve teaching, learning and assessment by ensuring that:
- all teachers set challenging and demanding work for all learners and apprentices, paying particular attention to the needs of the most able learners, and that they monitor carefully their progress towards meeting challenging targets
- teachers’ feedback enables all learners and apprentices to know exactly what they need to do to improve, achieve and excel.
- Improve the achievement rate for apprentices by ensuring that:
- employers are involved fully in the planning of assessments and reviews of progress in order to maximise the effectiveness of training
- assessors set apprentices challenging targets for achievement that clearly define how they can improve their work
- all apprentices who fall behind with their studies have the opportunity to catch up rapidly by increasing the number of assessment visits to the workplace.
- Improve governors’ oversight of the quality of provision and hold leaders to account by scrutinising achievement and progress data thoroughly.
- Ensure that all teachers motivate learners on study programmes to improve their mathematics skills and to problem-solve confidently.
- Reinforce apprentices’ understanding of British values and the risks associated with radicalisation and extremism.
- Make sure that learners from disadvantaged backgrounds receive the support they need to overcome their barriers to learning and achieve their qualifications at the same rate as other groups of learners.
- Ensure that all learners on study programmes have the opportunity to participate in relevant work-related learning that helps them prepare for future employment or training.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Take immediate steps to ensure that governors fulfil their responsibilities for reviewing safeguarding policies and procedures and by providing training for governors help them fully understand their responsibilities in relation to safeguarding.
- Ensure the continued improvement of teaching, learning and assessment, so that most are good or outstanding, through building on the existing best practice of teachers, meeting the needs of all students in lessons and paying particular attention to providing sufficient challenge for more able students. Help teachers to improve their use of technology, to support learning in their lessons.
- Improve the progress of all students, to match performance in the subjects where they make good or better progress by promoting ambition better in all lessons and ensure that teachers are able to better check the progress of their students, by full, and successful, implementation of the college’s new electronic tracking process.
- Improve teaching, learning and assessment for foundation English and mathematics, the proportion of high grades for GCSE English and the extent of successful completion for functional skills mathematics. In particular, make sure that teachers of foundation English teach what is relevant to students’ vocational learning or likely employment. Improve students’ understanding of the relevance of English by ensuring that their subject teachers link English skills to students gaining their qualifications, employment and higher education.
- Ensure that quality improvement arrangements to improve teaching and learning become fully effective by raising the standard and detail of the action plans developed to help teachers improve and significantly increase the monitoring by managers of teachers’ progress against their action plans.
- To meet the requirements of 16 to 19 study programmes, fully implement plans to provide students with a rigorous, and quality assured, programme for students’ employability skills and work experience.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that attendance and punctuality are consistently good across all areas of the college, particularly at the Basildon campus and on intermediate level courses by making teaching and learning more interesting and stimulating for learners, emphasising to tutors the importance of challenging poor punctuality and setting clear expectations for learners to attend lessons. Take immediate action to reinforce with learners the need to attend regularly is an important part of developing their employability skills.
- Increase good and outstanding teaching and learning through tutors having a greater focus on learners’ individual needs in lessons and greater expectations of what learners can achieve; and further development of the good arrangements already in place to use observations of teaching and learning and advanced teaching practitioners to identify how tutors can improve their teaching practice.
- Carry out a rigorous analysis of why male learners perform much less successfully than females. Ensure that the relevant faculties have detailed action plans and targets for how they intend to improve success rates for men and that student services throughout the college review the ways in which they can better support male learners who are at risk of not achieving.
- Strengthen arrangements for quality improvement to lessen the significant variations in the performance of different subject areas throughout the college. Make better use of the college’s accurate and useful data, the detailed monitoring of key performance indicators and the self-critical reports written for managers and governors to bring about much swifter and more effective interventions to rectify under-performance and to ensure greater consistency in learners’ experiences in all subject areas.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- below average success rates at GCE A and AS level
- students’ poor progress compared to their prior attainment in some GCE Alevel subjects
- the minority of teaching where students are insufficiently challenged and stretched.
What should be improved
- the proportion of very good and outstanding teaching
- students' achievements based on their prior attainment on many courses
- punctuality and attendance on some courses
- the consistency of feedback on assessments
- opportunities for staff at all levels to contribute to decision making.
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