Outstanding or questionable?
We’ve known for some time that some providers carefully select which learners will take national examinations, thereby maintaining high success rates. This inspection extract is from an outstanding college, published in May. It’s an approach you may or may not agree with, but it meets the learner’s best needs.
“Leaders and managers have taken bold and pragmatic actions to refine their apprenticeships. They recognise when an apprenticeship is not a good fit for the college, such as the apprenticeship in fire emergency and security system, which they transferred to a more specialist provider. Leaders have refined which employers they work with to ensure that apprentices have suitable job roles and the scope within their work to develop skills effectively when at work. They have improved how they support apprentices who are at risk of falling behind to catch up. Consequently, apprentices’ progress and retention have significantly improved, and achievement is now above national rates overall.”
This was outstanding provision. However, it is a process that worked for this provider. The draft inspection toolkit makes much of inclusion—is this approach inclusive, could your team present this as an inclusive approach?
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This month’s resource of the month – Barriers: CPD Supporting learning difficulties