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South Staffordshire College

2021 Full Inspection Report
What does the provider need to do to improve?
  • Leaders must ensure that all apprentices who require English and mathematics as part of their course receive high-quality teaching to help them develop these skills swiftly and achieve the qualifications within the planned time frame.
  • Leaders must ensure that teachers identify swiftly the gaps in learners’ and apprentices’ knowledge – including in English and mathematics – and use this information to plan teaching, so that learners catch up and make the progress that they should.
  • Leaders must ensure that adult learners receive helpful information and guidance about their next steps to ensure that they are able to make informed decisions about their future careers.
  • Ensure that all learners who have high needs receive the individual support to enable them to flourish.
  • Leaders must ensure that, where provided, teachers’ written feedback is sufficiently helpful to enable learners to improve their work.
  • Leaders must ensure that all learners and apprentices have the knowledge to protect themselves from extremist activity in their local communities.

2018 Full Inspection Report
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
  • Governors must hold the new senior leadership team thoroughly to account for the improvement of teaching, learning and assessment, ensuring that this leads to rapid and sustainable improvement in learners’ and apprentices’ progress and achievement.
  • Leaders and managers should rapidly improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment to address the inconsistencies across curriculum areas, subjects and teachers, by:
    • ensuring that managers use information about learners’ progress, standards of work, and the outcomes of lesson observations to identify accurately what individual teachers and assessors need to do to improve their performance and the outcomes for learners
    • identifying those vocational teachers who are already doing this well and ensuring that they have regular opportunities to share their approaches with colleagues.
  • Leaders should improve learners’ attendance and increase the proportion of learners and apprentices who achieve their qualifications, closing gaps in achievement by different groups of learners, by:
    • ensuring that teachers take into consideration learners’ starting points when planning individual targets, assignments and activities
    • ensuring that teachers provide helpful feedback and set challenging targets for their learners and apprentices, so that they can improve the quality of their work and make good progress.
  • Managers should increase the proportion of learners who make good progress in developing their English and mathematics skills, by:
    • improving the quality of teaching, learning and assessment in English and mathematics sessions
    • supporting teachers in vocational, English and mathematics courses to set work which enables learners to apply and develop their skills.
  • Leaders and managers should ensure that the curriculum for learners with high needs supports learners’ progression into employment through the provision of work-related programmes, including supported internships.
  • Leaders and managers should ensure that more learners complete a relevant external work placement which prepares them for their progression into work.

2016 Full Inspection Report
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
  • Rapidly improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment in those areas where learners do not achieve well enough or make the progress of which they are capable by:
    • ensuring that teachers use the outcomes of learners’ initial assessment to set meaningful, individual targets and to plan their lessons and assignments so that learners are challenged to meet these targets
    • ensuring that learners know the progress they are making and how to improve where necessary to achieve their learning goals
  • Strengthen teachers’ confidence to develop learners’ mathematics and English skills across all subjects by:
    • identifying those vocational teachers who already do this well and ensuring that they have regular opportunities to share their ideas and approaches with colleagues
    • supporting teachers in discrete provision to set work that enables learners to understand the relevance of exercises and topics to their vocational subjects and the world of work.
  • Ensure that study programme managers and teachers in all curriculum areas work with employers and learners to plan and implement work-experience arrangements that link to the learners’ study programmes and support their career ambitions.
  • Improve the use of targets to guide and motivate learners to achieve their potential by:
    • ensuring that all teachers recognise how to set specific and measurable targets covering learners’ development of skills, knowledge and understanding as well as achievement of qualification grades
    • ensuring that managers, teachers and learners regularly monitor how well learners achieve their targets and what they need to do to improve.

2013 Full Inspection Report
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
  • Ensure that teaching and learning on advanced-level courses stretch and challenge learners sufficiently to achieve their full potential.
  • Closely monitor the performance of apprenticeship programmes to ensure that the rapid improvements to the quality of provision continue.
  • Develop subject management to raise rapidly the standards on the minority of underperforming courses.
  • Increase the effectiveness of assessment on underperforming courses to ensure that learners receive support to improve their work.

2009 Full Inspection Report
Areas for improvement

The college should address:

  • low success rates at the Rodbaston campus
  • the low proportion of high grade achievements
  • low key skills success rates
  • the slow completion of advanced apprenticeship frameworks
  • insufficient good or outstanding teaching and learning
  • insufficient challenge for more able learners
  • underdeveloped use of ILT to aid learning
  • underdeveloped target setting
  • variable quality of curriculum management
  • inconsistent implementation of quality assurance procedures
  • poor accommodation at some sites.

Report Recommendations