Newbury College

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2015 Full Inspection Report
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
  • Ensure high quality target setting and frequent progress monitoring for all students.
  • Ensure all teachers provide precise and informative written and oral feedback that clearly tells students how they can improve and make better progress.
  • Provide high quality training and guidance to teachers so that they have the skills and confidence to teach English and mathematics in level 1 and level 2 functional skills lessons and in vocational settings so that students achieve their functional skills qualifications and successfully improve the standard of their literacy and numeracy.
  • Review and enforce strategies to ensure high attendance in all subject areas.
  • Ensure staff development and improvement activities closely align to those weaker aspects of teaching, learning and assessment identified through lesson observation, and also focus on techniques that will raise the quality of teaching, learning and assessment from good to outstanding.
  • Explore and implement arrangements to analyse, track and monitor accurately the progress students make relative to their starting points.

2009 Full Inspection Report
What does Newbury College need to do to improve further?
  • Encourage teachers to better plan the activities of support assistants, making it clear which activities, individuals or groups need help. Review the college allocation of learning support assistants or volunteers and arrange to monitor their activities to ensure that all are used to a consistently high standard.
  • Identify more clearly what is to be learned in lessons. Develop engaging ways to check that learning has taken place, including precise and directed open questioning of learners. Plan a sufficient range of tasks to challenge the more able and to motivate and keep the interest of the whole group.
  • Ensure that the findings from observations of lessons capture more precisely the key areas for improvement and that action-planning for teachers is sufficiently focused to lead to clear and measurable improvement.
  • Emphasise to teachers that the promotion of equality and diversity should be a routine part of all areas of the curriculum, to enable all learners to develop their awareness of these matters. Monitor this as part of lesson observations and clearly identify ways for individual teachers to improve.
  • Develop arrangements to better include franchise and subcontracted providers in the quality review process. Ensure that all aspects of the performance of subcontracted provision, particularly Train to Gain, are fully and routinely reviewed.

2006 Full Inspection Report
Areas for improvement

The college should address:

  • low success rates at level 1 for all age groups
  • increasing the amount of good and outstanding teaching
  • the lack of rigour in some course reviews
  • weaknesses in action planning for improvement
  • improving the impact of quality systems
  • improving participation in enrichment activities

2004 Full Inspection Report
What should be improved
  • retention rates
  • pass rates
  • management and pass rates in work-based learning
  • quality of teaching and learning
  • management, teaching and achievement of key skills
  • assessment practice
  • range of provision and progression opportunities
  • room utilisation and timetabling
  • staff development
  • data use for planning and development
  • curriculum management in many areas
  • basic skills support in vocational areas
  • use and monitoring of quality assurance to make improvements
  • self-assessment and its role in securing improvement.