What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Leaders should review the level 1 and level 2 curriculum to ensure that it fulfils its purpose and that teachers are ambitious, teach topics in enough depth and use assessment well to develop students’ knowledge and skills.
- Leaders should strengthen arrangements for providing and monitoring the effectiveness of support for students who have additional learning needs or who experience other barriers to success.
- Leaders should work with teachers and other staff to improve responses to low attendance.
- Vocational teachers should work to strengthen links with local employers and use these links to ensure that all their students benefit from relevant and well-planned work experience.
- Managers should work with staff to enhance the tutorial programme so that it provides students with opportunities to consider in detail topics that will help them to stay fit and healthy and to participate as active and informed citizens.
- Managers should review lesson observation processes to ensure that they complement the range of other quality assurance activities and help teachers to understand how their teaching practices may affect learning.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Leaders and managers should continue their effective work to raise the quality of teaching and learning and ensure that they fully prepare students for employment. To do this, leaders should concentrate on:
- ensuring that all students studying vocational subjects, and a greater number of students on academic courses, benefit from substantial external work placements
- improving the checking of learning in those subjects identified as requiring improvement
- improving and strengthening the range of activities used to develop students’ understanding of topics such as British values and the dangers of radicalisation and extremism.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment in those subjects where students do not progress well enough so that staff:
- make good use of value-added data and information on students’ prior attainment to plan lessons that challenge all students sufficiently
- plan and teach interesting and engaging lessons
- provide additional activities that help address any topics in which students are struggling
- assess frequently the progress of students and provide feedback that promotes their understanding and development.
- Further develop systems to identify students who are at risk of not reaching the end of their first year or who may not progress to their second year and use these to help them to remain at the college until the successful conclusion of their A levels.
- Improve students’ understanding of equality and diversity themes through the use of integrated and appropriate activities in lessons.
- Establish clear guidance for teachers for checking learning, and train staff in how to use the information this provides to adjust their teaching. Evaluate the effectiveness of this training through lesson observation and robust monitoring of students’ progress.
- Increase the number of students who benefit from work-related experiences to aid their understanding of the world of work and the demands of their possible careers.
- Monitor the effectiveness and the consistency of the implementation of the new systems designed to improve teaching, learning and assessment throughout the college. Transfer the good practice that exists between, and within, curriculum areas.
- Ensure, as a matter of urgency, that the internal lesson observation process focuses on the progress learners make across the whole range of academic, personal and employability skills and that all teachers are observed.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- unsatisfactory marking of and feedback on a minority of students’ assessments
- underdeveloped learning resources in the virtual learning environment
- insufficiently systematic monitoring of aspects of quality assurance.
What should be improved
- sharing of good practice within and across curriculum areas
- retention rates on adult courses
- the effectiveness of quality assurance arrangements
- use of IT within curriculum areas
- some accommodation.
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