What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Improve the quality of the curriculum, work placements and specialist support for learners with high needs.
- Ensure that young learners attend their English and mathematics lessons and ensure that the actions taken lead to greater achievement in these qualifications.
- Make sure that all learners and apprentices receive coherently planned and well-taught personal development as part of their curriculum, including effective careers guidance for all adult learners and learners with high needs.
- Involve employers more comprehensively in the design and implementation of all curriculums.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that the improved retention of students in 2014/15 and the good teaching, learning and assessment lead to a higher proportion of students achieving their qualification, particularly those aged 16 to 18.
- Improve the proportion of students who achieve the highest grades of which they are capable by using information about students’ prior qualifications more effectively to set students more stretching targets. Ensure students meet these targets by setting work that stretches the most able learners, both in lessons and through the work they complete outside of lessons.
- Raise students’ achievement on GCSE English and mathematics courses by ensuring students attend regularly, precisely identifying the skills they need to develop and practise, and ensuring they complete homework.
- Instil in vocational lecturers the importance of setting students clear targets for improving their English and mathematics and monitoring their progress in these subjects. Ensure vocational lecturers have a stronger focus on English and mathematics when reviewing students’ progress.
- Improve attendance at lessons for the minority of students by fully implementing the recently introduced strategies for increasing attendance and ensuring all students develop the skills and behaviours, which include attendance, that prepare them fully for employment.
- Provide high quality work-related activities and work experience for all students on study programmes so that they develop the skills they need to prepare them to progress into employment.
- Implement fully the plans to ensure suitable progression routes exist in all subject areas on the four college sites and ensure the college is well placed to respond to future needs of employers and other stakeholders, most notably through the expansion of apprenticeships, provision for school pupils and higher-level professional and technical qualifications.
What does the college need to do to improve further?
- Embed the culture of high expectations across staff, including in their expectations of students’ attendance and punctuality, in order to accelerate improvement.
- Develop teachers’ skills in helping students to learn theory, including ensuring the strategies teachers use promote students’ interest, engagement and ability to learn independently.
- Stabilise, strengthen and support teaching teams, particularly new teams, to ensure continuity in students’ learning and progress and to encourage the sharing of good practice.
- Implement fully the strategy to improve the teaching of English and mathematics and take urgent action to improve the quality of teaching of English, including ensuring that specialist teachers and vocational teachers work jointly to monitor students’ progress.
- Ensure that all staff are trained and supported to set sharply-focused targets for students to promote their maximum achievement.
- Further reduce the differences in the quality and effectiveness of provision across campuses through robust intervention and support from senior managers and rigorous quality assurance.
- Accelerate the impact of improvement action plans by ensuring all actions are explicit and supported by quantitative targets which are central to measuring success.
- Ensure assessors and training coordinators review the skills that apprentices are developing in the workplace thoroughly, provide detailed feedback that tells apprentices how to improve these skills and set challenging targets for apprentices to achieve.
What does Wiltshire College need to do to improve further?
- Maintain the current focus on implementing, monitoring and evaluating strategies to improve learners’ retention across the range of the college’s work.
- Critically review the advanced level offer in all subject areas, and where appropriate make arrangements, such as providing additional courses in hairdressing and more flexible arrangements in animal care, so that a wider range of learners can take courses and succeed.
- Provide more specific objectives for the work of learning support assistants (LSAs) in lessons; and ensure more consistent incorporation and management of additional learning targets for supported learners in electronic individual learning plans (e-ILPs) to enable learners to obtain the greatest benefit.
- Ensure that self-assessment is used more effectively to provide a sharper focus on learners’ underperformance at advanced level and improve quality improvement planning by ensuring that actions planned are the most appropriate to resolve the issues being addressed.
- Carry out more systematic review of learners’ performance to identify both gaps in achievement and good outcomes by specific groups, in order to plan for targeted improvement and the sharing of effective practice.
- Ensure that equality and diversity are promoted effectively in lessons by providing effective staff development and ensuring that teaching observations consistently report on the quality of this work in lessons.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- success rates at level 3 for learners aged 16-18
- the variation in success rates across the range of the college’s work
- learners’ attendance
- the significant proportion of lessons that remain only satisfactory
- insufficiently rigorous target setting in individual learning plans
- the focus and effectiveness of quality improvement
- the rigour and reliability of self-assessment
- sharing of good practice across the college.
n/a
What should be improved
- support for part-time students
- recruitment to level 1 vocational courses and advanced level general education courses
- promotion of equal opportunities
- low space utilisation
- accuracy of management information data
- unsatisfactory provision in engineering.
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