Quality Standards

Quality standards: Around the College

The college has recently introduced some new quality standards.

Quality standards: Classroom management and routines

Teachers arrive promptly to lessons and welcome students at door.
Teachers direct seating arrangements according to seating plans - alphabetical boy/girl plans must be used to start with.
KS3 students are required to get out their equipment [including organiser ] and stand behind their desks.
KS4 students are expected to be ready for a prompt start to the lesson.
All lessons start promptly.
A register should be taken towards the start of every lesson.
Students who arrive late should be dealt with appropriately.
The teaching environment should be well organised and stimulating with high
quality and relevant displays that model levels/grades.
Classrooms should be tidy, litter free, welcoming and business like.
The classroom should be a safe environment where students can take
risks without fear of humiliation.
At the end of lessons students should be dismissed from workplaces and followed into the corridor by teacher.
Resources are of high quality and accessible to students.
The collection of resources is well organised and orderly.
The teacher is at the door of the classroom to receive the next class.
The Behaviour for Learning policy is consistently and rigorously implemented and all students given a fresh start at every lesson.

Quality standards: Teaching and learning

Teachers are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the subject they are teaching.
Setting: classes should be set based on FFT (D at KS2) targets or Achievement Co-ordinator targets.
Set changes must be authorised by Achievement Co-ordinator and HOCA
EAL students should in principle always be placed in top sets. » Teachers are actively engaged with students throughout lessons,
Teachers use a range of skills including:

Providing engaging starters
Explaining logically and clearly
Proceeding in small steps but at a pace
Demonstrating or using interesting examples
Using a wide variety of types of questions
Providing opportunities for practising different learning styles
Giving feedback which encourages and corrects - AFL
Setting objectives which challenge and motivate all students
Including Most Able in every lesson.
Summing up and delivering effective plenaries

Schemes of work meet statutory requirements and are consistently applied
Planning happens in relationship to knowledge about students' abilities, prior attainment and learning styles. The following data must be in teacher planners and used to raise standards and expectations:

Details of homework set by teacher including:

Title of work set
Date of work set
Stickers for warning
Detentions for students not completing homework
Marks or grades awarded

All teachers plan to support the development of students' skills in literacy, numeracy and ICT.

Learning objectives are differentiated for every lesson linked to NC levels/ GCSE descriptors and are shared with students.

Learning activities enable students to secure the planned learning objectives. Engagement not control should underpin the design of activities.

Teachers use a variety of teaching methods - individual and group work is evident - which achieve the learning objectives, and different learning styles.

Activities should be time related and students be given regular time checks. Learning objectives should be reviewed and summarised at the end of the lessons.

A range of assessment for learning [AFL] strategies, linked to learning objectives,

should be used to inform next steps in learning.

All students' work is marked in accordance with the college feedback policy.

Feedback is given to students which enables them to understand what they must do to improve.

Homework is always:

Identifiable in students' books or files because it has been clearly headed as 'H/W.
Set in the first half of the lesson and in accordance with h/w timetables and schemes of work
Recorded by all students
Differentiated where necessary taking all students' learning forward particularly stretching Most Able for lessons at Alec Hunter