What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Leaders and managers should rapidly improve the few programmes that are underperforming, including level 3 animal management, so that learners and apprentices benefit from an ambitious curriculum and make the progress of which they are capable.
- Leaders and managers should ensure that apprentices and learners with high needs receive independent information, advice and guidance about their chosen pathways and potential career opportunities so that they can make informed, long-term career choices.
- Leaders and managers should plan a personal development curriculum that apprentices can participate in and benefit from.
- Leaders and managers should ensure that apprentices develop a good understanding of radicalisation and extremism and how it applies to them while at work and in their personal lives.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Managers need to speed up their actions to improve the retention of 16- to 19-year-old learners.
- Managers and assessors should improve the use of initial assessment to enable them to set more precise and developmental targets for apprentices attending off-the-job training at the college so that more apprentices achieve their qualifications within planned timescales.
- Teachers need to plan additional activities into their lessons so that they challenge more able learners to extend their skills and knowledge further.
- Managers and teachers need to focus relentlessly on improving attendance at English and mathematics classes; they also need to track the progress of learners taking English and mathematics GCSE qualifications more rigorously, so that they can provide additional support for those learners who are falling behind.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Swiftly improve the standard of teaching, learning and assessment so that it is consistently high across all subject areas and leads to a significant improvement in the proportion of students and apprentices who achieve their qualifications. Ensure that teachers and assessors consistently use stimulating activities that challenge and motivate students and apprentices, including the most able. Use learning technology effectively to enhance teaching and to extend students’ and apprentices’ knowledge and skills.
- Ensure that written feedback on the work of students and apprentices is sufficiently detailed, and enables them to understand what they need to do to improve further.
- Ensure that all teachers and assessors make good use of information about students’ starting points and prior achievements when planning their lessons so that teaching and learning successfully meets the needs of individual students and apprentices.
- Ensure that all students, and particularly younger students on study programmes, quickly improve their English and mathematics skills and achieve qualifications in these subjects.
- Increase students’ attendance by taking swift action to support students whose attendance is a cause for concern, monitoring closely and accurately attendance in lessons, and ensuring that the information that managers receive about attendance is robust.
- Evaluate the quality of teaching, learning and assessment accurately through observations of learning and by checking closely the progress that students and apprentices are making. Use this information to assess accurately the college’s progress in raising standards. Quickly identify necessary actions that departments and individual teachers need to take to tackle areas for improvement, and monitor the impact of these actions on improving standards.
What does Wigan and Leigh College need to do to improve further?
- Improve success rates on apprenticeship programmes by increasing the effectiveness of reviews of learners’ progress in driving attainment. Provide learners with the individual support and guidance they need to help them complete their programmes.
- Improve success rates for adults at level 1 and continue the trend in improvement on learner responsive provision through introducing thorough systems to set learners clear, challenging and realistic targets which are well monitored so that all learners have the opportunity to achieve their potential.
- Improve the consistency and quality of teaching and learning through better arrangements for lesson observations including greater clarity about the purpose of the developmental observations.
- Improve the quality and use of individual learning plans by making better use of the outcomes of initial assessment and using students’ identified needs to plan teaching.
- Improve teachers’ understanding and promotion of equality and diversity in learning and review sessions through focused staff development and qualitative monitoring of the content of reviews.
- Improve curriculum management in weaker performing curriculum areas by ensuring that college systems are consistently applied.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- low success rates on AS courses
- poor attendance
- insufficient use of data on learners’ prior attainments to measure progress
- uninspiring teaching and lack of challenge for some learners
- unsatisfactory accommodation in a minority of areas.
n/a
What should be improved
- poor standard of accommodation in many areas
- failure to meet funding targets
- well below average pass rates for students aged 16 to 18 at level 2 in 1999/2000 and 2000/01
- insufficient use of ICT in teaching and learning
- insufficient sharing of good practice.
|
