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Using Online Tracking to Raise the Achievement of Off-Campus Learners
The Tamar Valley Consortium Experience
Introduction The Tamar Valley Consortium (TVC) has been in existence for over 20 years and enables 17 schools to extend their curriculum offer by using the facilities of 3 colleges of further education and 22 private training providers. Based in Plymouth and serving its ‘travel to learn zone’, the TVC creates opportunities for those in the 14 – 19 age group to access an additional 90 different work related learning qualifications. Currently 1,054 young people are learning with the TVC (January 2009). New Achievement Targets The TVC has been long been applauded for its collaborative approach. Learners are motivated, remain in education and learning longer and progress to positive destinations. But in 2001 the measurable achievement of TVC learners was challenged. It was agreed that too few learners were achieving full awards A Strategic Area Review set new Post 16 Achievement targets for the consortium: • 2004/5 – 55% Full awards • 2005/6 – 65% Full awards • 2006/7 – 80% Full awards Raising Achievement Strategy A strategy to address this was devised and implemented. The strategy had 3 strands: The strategy has an impact Immediately the plan had an impact and achievement rates rose to 49% in the first year (2003/4) and 64% the following year (2004/5). We were ahead of the targets set. The 65% level proved difficult to exceed however and success rates remained static for three years. During this time the TVC team explored other lines of attack. Partial success rates were running at 80% and this was taken as an indication that these young people had the potential to succeed. How could we help them to gain the additional units to make up a full award? Group discussions and individual interviews were held with all providers to gain an understanding of the problem. A barrier to full success Strand 3 of our improvement strategy was proving difficult to fully implement. The difficulty lay with the communication gap that followed physical break when a learner went off-site. We had traditionally used paper-based methods for registering students and reporting progress. Absences were telephoned through to schools on a daily basis but there was often a delay in the information reaching the right person. The providers were frustrated that poor attendance and other reported concerns were not acted upon with sufficient urgency. Written reports were being completed each term but by the time these reached the people who could make a difference it was often too late. We needed a more immediate means of communicating so that targeted support could be provided without delay. An electronic solution? Plymouth was working on an electronic individual learning plan (eILP) with Webbased and we discovered there was a linked attendance and progress tracking module under development. It offered online registration, reporting and instantaneous communication of learner progress between all partners in TVC learning. We immediately agreed to pilot these tools through the TVC. In September 2007 we introduced i-Plymouth online attendance registering. All TVC learners (then 949) were entered into the database, placed into teaching groups and staff were given passwords to access information. It took a while to fully set up the new system and we ran dual systems for a term but we soon had everyone registering on line. Electronic breakthough The success exceeded our expectations. It did take some time to convince everyone that it would work, but school staff soon valued being able to view individual and group attendance on screen at any time. The registers could be downloaded to spreadsheets and printed out for those who required paper versions, but when these were lost, new and up to date copies could be instantly obtained by logging on to i-Plymouth. The TVC office had full overview of all registers and could check that these had been completed on schedule. It proved possible to spot patterns developing, and target support before it was too late. In the summer term this proved invaluable. When there were other distractions (this is Devon – the sun is shining and surf is up!) we were able to keep absenteeism under control, and more learners on track to achieve their learning goal. At the end of the year we introduced the progress monitoring tool (eProgress books) which we would be using to track progress. This first eProgress book was kept simple: what had the learner achieved and what were they intending to do next year? The providers completed this during the summer break and by September 2008 we had accurate results for every TVC learner. All records were broken; 79.8% of post 16 students gained full awards, 90.4% gained units towards their award and retention was held at 91%. We are convinced that the online attendance reporting enabled us to shortcut the communication delay between the schools and off-site providers. Absenteeism was often a sign of other, sometimes deep seated problems and the immediate relaying of registers ‘flagged this up’ allowing intervention to be timely and advised. There is an important message here for all types of collaborative delivery.
Electronic monitoring enables standards to be maintained.
Update: September 2009 - Post 19 Full awards 78.4%, partial awards (achievers) 92.3% and retention 92.4%. While the achievement of full awards has not been improved this year, the results are very close to last year and we seem to have raised this critical measure to another plateau. The percentage of learners achieving partial success (units towards the target qualification) has risen to 92.9%. The graph to the below shows the improvement in achievement of full and partial awards over the last eight years.
Robert Mountjoy
TVC Director
January 2009