What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Accelerate the progress that students make when they study A levels in biology, physics, psychology and English literature.
- Further improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment by ensuring that teachers provide feedback to A-level students and adult students that helps them to understand how to improve their responses to questions that they may face in examinations and in their written assignments.
- Improve attendance on adult learning courses by ensuring that all staff set high expectations for attendance and follow up non-attendance rigorously.
- Further develop strategies to develop the skills that students need to be successful in adult life by:
- carefully targeting work-related activities that students on 16 to 19 study programmes participate in, based on their starting points, to enable them to develop their skills and behaviours to their full potential
- ensuring that adult students who study only vocational courses develop the English and mathematical skills that they need to secure employment or take on extra responsibilities in the workplace.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Improve teaching, learning and assessment by ensuring that:
- teachers check students’ progress regularly and plan activities that will challenge the most able and provide support for those who find the topic difficult so that all students make good progress in their studies
- staff make students more aware of the progress they are making towards achieving their qualification and enable them to make the progress of which they are capable.
- Use quality improvement measures more effectively to identify how to improve teaching in weak subjects quickly and consistently.
- Ensure that students receive effective teaching and good support to help them achieve grades A* to C in GCSE English and mathematics resits.
- Tackle the variation in achievement rates on level 3 programmes so that students’ progress and achievement in all subject areas reach the same high standards as those in the best performing courses.
What does Franklin College need to do to improve further?
- Evaluate the impact of actions to rectify underperformance in the few remaining weaker subjects, ensuring that students’ views are incorporated into this. Use this evaluation to plan further actions in order to effect more rapid and sustained improvements.
- Consolidate the improvements made to the quality of teaching, learning and assessment by ensuring that teaching always challenges every student and especially stretches the more able, so that the proportion of high grades increases and all students achieve as well as they can.
- Provide further training to all staff to ensure that all judgements in self-assessment reports are sharply focused, self-critical, and lead to effective actions.
- As the new management structure continues to develop further, ensure that roles and responsibilities at all levels within it are clear to all staff.
What does Franklin College need to do to improve further?
- Ensure rapid and sustained improvement in success rates at GCE AS level and intermediate level by implementing existing retention strategies rigorously and evaluating their impact fully.
- Increase the percentage of high grades across advanced-level courses by improving lesson planning to ensure that the needs of individual students are met through appropriate and challenging learning activities. Provide greater opportunities, including homework assignments, to supplement learning in class.
- Ensure that all lesson plans include a stronger focus on the development of students’ literacy, numeracy and oracy skills and use lesson observations to evaluate how effectively students acquire and improve these skills.
- Improve the quality and consistency of teaching and learning by using the outcomes of lesson observations to inform actions for improvement. Devise mechanism to encourage regular sharing of good practice between classroom practitioners.
- Increase the rigour of self-assessment through deeper interrogation, involving all staff, of the root causes of underperformance. Use data more systematically to analyse performance across the college and to inform where improvements are needed. Use data more systematically to develop precise and measurable targets for all aspects of performance. Monitor progress against targets regularly. Evaluate fully actions taken to remedy weaknesses and use the outcome of this evaluation to set further targets to raise and sustain performance at a high level.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- success rates for 16-18 year olds in some courses, particularly at AS level
- the frequency of teaching and learning observations
- some poor and ageing accommodation.
What should be improved
- timeliness of some initial assessment arrangements at level 3
- retention rates on level 2 programmes for students aged 16 to 18
- the quality of some tutorials
- accessibility to some specialist curriculum resources at peak times
- accessibility of management information to curriculum area teams
- poor implementation and evaluation of action plans in a minority of curriculum areas.
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