What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Senior leaders must set clear expectations for managers and staff and give them the knowledge, support and appropriate accountability for making rapid improvements to the quality of education.
- Managers must ensure that apprentices’ learning plans take account of individual starting points and better link off- and on-the-job learning, to enable them to make the swifter progress of which they are capable.
- Leaders and managers should ensure that students understand how the personal development curriculum relates to their own lives and situations.
- Teachers must provide all students and apprentices with clear and timely feedback so they can use this to improve their work and skills.
- Leaders and managers should review delivery of the internship programme for students with high needs so that they benefit from high-quality work experience.
- Leaders and managers should improve advice and guidance for students on education programmes for young people to ensure that they are effectively supported for transition into the workplace.
What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Maintain a close focus on achievement rates and ensure that these become sustainably good across all courses and provision types.
- Support staff to improve the effectiveness of theory teaching across curriculum areas and provision types. Where appropriate, leaders and managers should share examples of good practice in teaching and learning from practical vocational areas.
- Ensure that all teachers plan learning that makes effective use of initial assessments, meets individual needs and involves sufficient challenge for the most able and the least able in every class.
- Make sure that all teachers and assessors provide feedback for students and apprentices that identifies and/or corrects mistakes in work and shows them how to improve.
- Improve attendance in English and mathematics classes at all levels.
- Improve target-setting and progress reviews for apprentices so that they have clear, challenging targets that help them to improve their work and develop their skills and understanding.
- Support staff to improve curriculum-level self-assessment, the accuracy and effectiveness of teaching and learning observation activity, and the tracking of students’ and apprentices’ progress.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Managers should immediately take effective steps to improve the poor attendance and punctuality of students, and increase their opportunities to make good progress.
- Leaders and managers should increase the proportion of students and apprentices who achieve their qualifications.
- Leaders and managers should urgently strengthen the teaching of English and mathematics to ensure that students are able to improve their skills and achieve their qualifications.
- Managers should ensure that all students on study programmes develop their workrelated skills through participation in meaningful external work experience.
- Managers should improve teaching, learning and assessment by ensuring that:
- teachers set stimulating and demanding targets for students and apprentices, paying particular attention to their starting points and closely monitoring the progress they are making
- teachers’ feedback enables all students and apprentices to know exactly what they need to do to improve, achieve and fulfil their potential.
- Managers need to ensure that development plans for teachers following observations of teaching and learning focus more closely on the impact of teaching, learning and assessment on students’ progress.
- Managers should involve employers more fully in the planning of apprenticeship learning to ensure that all apprentices make good progress and achieve within the planned time.
What does Southampton City College need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that all teachers follow a systematic, coherent and relentless approach to improving students’ attendance at lessons.
- Increase the proportion of outstanding lessons by ensuring that all staff and college observers are better able to recognise and describe excellent lessons.
- Improve communications with employers of work-based learners to involve them more effectively in monitoring learners’ performance and improving success rates.
- Improve the validity of self-assessment judgements and action planning for improvement by increasing the collection and use of students’ and employers’ views.
- Extend high-quality safeguarding to work-based learners by ensuring its effective promotion to employers and monitoring its implementation rigorously.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- arrangements to improve the quality of teaching and learning
- slow progress in developing the use of data to assess students’ progress
- the inadequate quality of provision in construction
- weaker aspects of quality assurance and curriculum management
- the slow management response to pockets of poor performance.
Areas for improvement
- Poor punctuality
- Framework achievement rates for advanced apprentices
- Feedback from teachers in portfolios
- Low success rates on advanced apprenticeships
What should be improved
- leadership and management of work-based learning
- retention and pass rates on apprenticeship programmes
- the proportion of good or better teaching and learning
- some workshops and other practical areas
- student enrolments to meet targets
- the use of data to inform thorough quality assurance at course level
- systems to ensure appropriate arrangements for staff cover.
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