What does Herefordshire College of Technology need to do to improve further?
- Improve college and Train to Gain success rates to well above the national average by embedding the range of strategies which have strengthened retention and achievement and consolidating the current in-year improvements.
- Promote teachers’ skills in using strategies that challenge and stretch learners, including the increased use of more demanding questions, greater emphasis on matching tasks to individual ability and making sure that learners think for themselves, so that more learners make consistently good progress relative to their respective starting points.
- Support teachers to develop equality and diversity themes fully in lessons and tutorials and to reinforce learners’ awareness and understanding over and above where equality and diversity issues occur naturally.
- Strengthen the college’s response to the entitlement for learners aged 16–18 by reviewing timetabling arrangements to increase access to, and participation in, the cross-college enrichment programme and by monitoring group tutorials more closely to ensure all key themes are covered and reinforced consistently across the college.
- Strengthen equality and diversity policies to ensure they underpin the college’s work and embed arrangements for the timely reporting of progress against equality and diversity action plans.
- Embed arrangements to increase the rigour of internal lesson observations by enabling observers to assess learning and progress in lessons more effectively and ensuring observation records are evaluative and accurately graded. Ensure that appraisals take systematic account of the outcomes from lesson observations, and of targets set at earlier appraisals.
- Secure greater consistency in success rates and the quality of provision between different curriculum areas through more effective sharing of good practice. Ensure new courses are monitored closely to minimise risk of failure.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- the requirements of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000
- the development and embedding of the Skills for Life strategy
- planning to ensure the needs of all learners are met in all lessons
- the rigour of self-assessment and quality assurance at course level.
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What should be improved
- unsatisfactory teaching of many students aged 16 to 18
- narrow curriculum for full-time IT, secretarial and humanities students
- unsatisfactory student attainments on full-time courses in IT and courses in engineering and hospitality
- low retention rates on many full-time courses
- uneven quality of student guidance and curriculum planning
- some poor accommodation and equipment
- some weak self-assessment procedure and practice.
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