Placement cycle

The image on the left hand side displays the quality cycle within my placement. The first step focuses on students results’ as the colleges’ priority is to provide support students’ to achieve their targeted grades and potentially encourage students’ to achieve higher. When speaking with the appropriate member of staff in charge of quality within the college they are quoted saying ‘we need students’ to pass the course to keep funding and keep students’ coming through the door’. Within further education settings, a percentage of every institution’s base funding is allocated according to performance (Hermes 2012). Therefore this particular setting focuses on retaining the funding through promoting positive grades and encouraging students’ to surpass their expectations. The remaining steps focus on breaking down the results of students’, once broken down they are compared against the national benchmark. Many factors directly and indirectly affect both grades and aspirations. Factors such as quality checks are proven to improve students’ grades (Christofides et al 2015). Results are then compared to college expectations to determine if the grades have met the quality expectations set by the college. Finally the expected results are evaluated against the student predicted grades to analyse the performance of the college. The quality cycle demonstrates the amount of reflection for quality taken to ensure the institute is performing at the desired quality standard.

Typical cycle

The image on the right hand side displays the typical quality cycle in place for institutes to adapt. The first step focuses on assess and planning when comparing this to my placement, there is a clear adaptation. Where the typical cycle has a broad analysis where it could be comparing grades, quality of provision or quality of grades, my placement has focused on students results’. The second step is to act and log for evidence, in comparison to my setting, which has focused on retaining the funding through promoting positive grades, there is a common theme. The theme being that both cycles log evidence and act accordingly based on evidence. More specifically is quality is to be evidenced, quality checks can be assessed in a variety of ways, these being data collection, classroom observations, interviews with the teachers, and samples of lesson plans (Edwards 2015).The third step being to summarise and report links well with my placement as the template could summarise the quality in place for students’ grades (Pershing 2014). Within my placement the focus remains on breaking down results and comparing them to national averages. The typical cycle refers to summarising information and reporting on the information much like the placement cycle.