What does the provider need to do to improve?
- Leaders need to appoint expert staff to teach apprentices to ensure that they can make progress and achieve their qualifications in a timely manner.
- Leaders need to improve the quality of feedback teachers provide to learners, to ensure that all learners, including apprentices and learners with high needs know how to improve their work.
- Leaders need to ensure that staff accurately track the progress that all learners with high needs make on specialist programmes. They need to provide these learners with the advice and guidance they need to plan their next steps in education and work.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that staff place a greater emphasis on developing learners’ English and mathematics skills in order to support them in their studies and prepare them for employment or further study.
- Improve learners’ attendance at lessons by ensuring that they understand the importance of frequent attendance.
- Provide better support to apprentices so that the proportion who achieve their qualification within the agreed timeframe improves.
- Ensure that staff use the information they have on learners’ prior knowledge and attainment to plan and teach lessons to meet their individual learning needs.
- Teachers need to ensure that learners know what progress they are making and what they need to do to improve.
- Leaders and managers should continue to implement their strategies to improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Leaders and managers should build on their successful work to improve the achievements of learners, ensuring that achievements improve on all levels and on all courses, and that more learners achieve high grades.
- Managers must ensure that teachers fully use the information gathered from the initial and ongoing assessment of learners, to plan and teach lessons that set high expectations and meet individual learners’ needs, and that their teaching and assessment strategies ensure good progress for learners.
- Building on the good practice in the management of apprenticeships by the college’s subcontractors, managers must improve target-setting and progress reviews for college-based apprentices to ensure that more apprentices complete their programmes in the planned time.
- Senior leaders need to ensure that the new management arrangements for English and mathematics have maximum impact on the improvement of teaching and learning, outcomes for learners and learners’ attendance, by:
- placing an uncompromising emphasis on high-quality teaching and learning
- requiring that all staff fully promote the benefits to learners of improving their skills in English and mathematics
- continuing to prioritise the close monitoring of learners’ attendance in English and mathematics, against clear attendance targets, and that learners fully understand the need to meet them.
- To further support learners’ understanding of the world of work, managers need to ensure an increase in the pace of securing external work experience for learners on study programmes.
- Improve learners’ independent learning and encourage their greater use of the college’s virtual learning environment; ensure that all teachers are helped to make best use of distance learning resources and to develop resources in their subject areas.
What does the college need to do to improve further?
- Take urgent steps to ensure that industrial action does not continue to affect learners so they can be confident in the continuity of teaching and the likelihood of completing their qualifications successfully.
- Increase the amount of good and outstanding teaching, learning and assessment through more opportunities to share good practice; a continued focus on maintaining the rigour of lesson observations; improved planning of lessons; and more detailed feedback to learners about what they need to do to improve their work.
- Urgently improve attendance in all subject areas and learners’ appreciation of the need to arrive at lessons on time as an important part of developing their work readiness. Reinforce with teachers the importance of setting clear expectations about attendance and punctuality, including learners’ adherence to college rules.
- Take advantage of the increasingly good relationships with local employers and companies involved in local regeneration projects to arrange work placements for learners so they can experience the commercial demands of the workplace.
- Strengthen arrangements for quality improvement and performance management to raise standards in the significant number of subject areas where teaching, learning and assessment and outcomes for learners are not yet good.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- In order for learners to fulfil their potential, increase the proportion of lessons that are good or better by:
- maintaining the rigour of lesson observations, so that teachers who require improvement and development are identified and receive support promptly
- increasing opportunities for teachers to view and share good practice within, and between, teams
- strengthening teachers’ skills in using the detailed information on learners’ abilities in English and mathematics to create learning activities which meet the needs of individual learners
- enhancing teachers’ skills and confidence in developing English and mathematics routinely in all lessons
- ensuring that teachers’ feedback on marked work, and learners’ individual targets and actions, are sufficiently detailed and precise, so that learners know what to do to improve further.
- In order to improve outcomes for learners, make sure that course teams are supported to produce consistent and evaluative annual reviews and action plans.
- Develop the confidence and understanding of a minority of course teams so that they promote equality and diversity effectively in lessons.
What does Lambeth College need to do to improve further?
- Improve students’ outcomes and raise standards by a thorough review of enrolment procedures so that students are placed correctly on the most appropriate courses. Ensure that recently strengthened procedures for close monitoring of students’ progress are applied thoroughly. Intervene promptly for those identified as at risk of leaving or underachieving.
- Improve the standard of teaching and learning by ensuring that all teachers provide challenging tasks and activities which enable students to raise their expectations and make sustained progress.
- Develop greater consistency in the ability of all staff to set and monitor targets in individual learning plans, so that students improve their performance and do not fall behind in their studies.
- Ensure that the promotion of equality and diversity forms an integral part of lessons and progress reviews in order to broaden students’ understanding of their place in a culturally diverse society.
- Ensure that governors receive detailed and timely information on key performance measures and indicators, including national averages, to enable the board to monitor the college’s performance effectively and provide appropriate challenge and direction.
- Ensure that the underlying reasons for weaker performance are accurately identified through self-assessment, including analysis of the quality of teaching, and that quality improvement plans detail specifically what needs to improve and how this is to be achieved.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- the further improvement of learners’ success rates, especially for learners aged 16-18 at level 3 and adults at level 1
- increasing the proportion of lessons that are good or better
- continuing the improvement in learners’ attendance
- target-setting for learners.
What should be improved
- retention rates for students aged 16 to 18 at level 3
- the proportion of good or better teaching for students aged 16 to 18 at levels 1 and 2
- accommodation in some areas
- punctuality of many students.
1999 Full Inspection Report
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