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Key issues and activities In line with our continuing growth in membership, Landex has recently increased its staff to allow closer working relationships with a wide range of other membership organisations, and provide a rapid response to the challenges faced by member colleges and universities. This will allow us to build upon our progress in helping members to achieve the highest standards of teaching, learning and student experience. Our activity in key areas of our strategic plan has continued, with particular emphasis upon:
Quality improvement 2010 has been another year of excellent progress towards our goal, of good of better quality being delivered in all Landex colleges and universities. Peer review has continued to be our main method of effectively sharing good practice and forming shared views of the required standards. The support of the Learning Skills Improvement Service for this activity has been a key element of our success. Landex completed three LSIS funded projects which have:
Landex colleges have freely and willingly shared performance data and this has been used to more accurately identify high and low performing areas and to support action planning for improvement. Landex has increased its quality improvement activity significantly completing over 60 visits to Landex colleges supported by a Landex quality officer and a senior member of staff from another Landex college, spending well over 100 days on site directed towards:
To further support members, significant volumes of data have been collected both nationally and from Landex colleges. Once analysed this data has provided a range of ideas for improvement. Evidence of Success Landex member colleges are enjoying success and benefitting from their membership of Landex. Based on analysis of the previous complete round of Ofsted inspections conducted between 2005 and 2009, the average grades awarded for land based provision in member colleges increased by 11.5% more than in, non-member colleges where land based courses are inspected. Three of the twelve Landex colleges that have been inspected or re-inspected under the new Ofsted inspection arrangements were judged to be providing outstanding land based provision. The recently published Ofsted ‘outstanding providers’ list names nine Landex members in the FE college sector that were found to be outstanding during inspection, and six in the Under-18 Social Care section (over half of all the FE colleges with residential accommodation). Confidence in college management has been expressed in every one of the seventeen Landex colleges that have received either ‘Institutional Audit’ (higher education institutions) or an ‘Integrated Quality and Enhancement Review’ (Further Education Colleges with Higher Education provision) of the quality of learning and for the standards of awards that they offer on behalf of awarding bodies. Although there were relatively few curriculum level inspections in the last round of inspections, this confirms a trend observed in previous inspection rounds, where land based provision has been judged consistently higher quality in member colleges, than in the rest of the sector., This reinforces the pattern that emerged in the previous Ofsted cycle (between 2001 and 2005) and also in the prior round conducted by the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC). Landex progress spans over a decade and there is evidence that land based provision is best where the college has a clear strategic emphasis on offering a range of provision, supported by good and extensive practical resources, together with a commitment to quality which results in a beneficial experience of learners. A self-improvement/regulation model Ongoing discussions, consultations and considered debate have taken place to move the Landex Quality Improvement Strategy forward and develop it in a way which would accelerate the pace towards a position where colleges entitled to use the Landex logo could be identified with high quality provision in all its manifestations. The ambition is to be increasingly true to our strap-line: Land Based colleges aspiring to excellence. This suggested a need for greater clarity and rigour in terms of our structures and processes. This Landex debate coincided with two other important debates in the wider world of government and further education. The analysis in the Cabinet Office publication Excellence and Fairness (August 2008) argued that the time was right for a switch from a compliance–based approach to performance management to a more self-motivated and professionalised one. The underlining implication was that whilst the former approach was producing some ‘good’ results, to become ‘great’ there is a need to move to the latter position in terms of public service delivery in particular. This was picked up and explored in detail through a series of Learning and Skills Improvement Service seminars as it looked at Self-regulation – shifting the paradigm during the Spring of 2009. The Landex response resulted in the development of our own version of moving from good to great called from Grey to Green described in the following diagram. It provides a framework for both greater self-regulation and improvement. It is designed to be used as a tool to enable individual colleges to monitor their own journey in terms of improving the quality of what they do in relation to the criteria which Landex member colleges have collectively agreed are most relevant to them and the services they provide to learners and their industries. It is not intended that this should be used to colour code or rank colleges in terms of their current position on that journey. This information will remain confidential to the College and the small sub-committee of the Landex Board that meets annually to determine the extent to which member colleges are continuing to conform to membership criteria. It is intended that this will indeed accelerate the speed of the journey to excellence for all Landex Colleges.
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