New College Stamford: Case Study

Stamford College learners have created over 16,000 posts capturing their personal development

SETTING

Stamford College is a large FE college, specialising in post-16 learning programmes (A levels, BTECs and skills-based courses) and offering higher education courses (HNDs and HNCs, Foundation Degrees and Access to HE).

NUMBER OF LEARNERS

2,000+

NUMBER OF TEACHERS

100+

 

STAFF FEEDBACK

“Kloodle has turned out to be one of those “win/win” situations for us. Teaching staff and heads of department like the analytic and tracking elements, but what far outweighs this is that the students can articulate its benefits – it becomes particularly useful when they need to complete UCAS personal statements and Job applications!” –  Phil Smith, Head of Student Services, New College Stamford

Stamford’s main issue and opportunity

The college recognised it was providing learners with a vast array of experiences over and above their core curriculum, including; work experience; enrichment; work related learning; leadership opportunities and a fantastic personal development programme that knitted it all together. What was missing though, was an effective and engaging method for students to record the personal development activities that they had undertaken, and reflect on their experiences and learning.

Aware of the greater emphasis placed on personal development in Ofsted’s new Common Inspection Framework, college leadership sought to implement a digital solution that enabled: –

  • A dashboard overview of the personal development progress of the college’s students, enabling teachers and curriculum heads to track the progress of the students’ personal development, but would also be easily presentable in any inspection or internal audit. 

 

  • An engaging way for students to evidence and reflect on their personal development activities, that would allow students to embed video content and upload documents, and track employment focused activities, such as work experience and volunteering.

 

  • A mobile phone friendly solution so that students could independently manage the content they upload at any time they wanted, without the barrier of having to be on campus – for example: Evenings, weekends or even residential trips. 

 

  • A visual tool to enable students and teachers to track the development of skills over the course of a study programme. They wanted a tool that would facilitate a comparison between initial skills students had at the start of their course, and to show how these skills have been developed during their study. 

The college assessed several viable options and elected to use Kloodle due to its precise recording functionality and bespoke reporting features for students and staff.

 

After year 1 of usage, the college decided to broaden the scope of Kloodle, increasing the use of the Skills Wheel functionality to capture the subject specific skills being developed on learners’ courses as well as more generic employability skills, such as leadership and communication. A mock Ofsted inspection stated that the college is clearly developing skills throughout the curriculum, but required to make these more prominent so that students were not only aware of the skills they were developing, but could also identify which elements of their course were contributing to which skills students developed.

Method of Implementation

The curriculum teams took the lead on populating skills wheels and the initial setup, but would regularly review the course specific elements. To capture the other elements of personal development the college used their team of Student advisors who regularly facilitate, in conjunction with curriculum areas, students updating their Kloodle profiles, to create that all important college wide approach.

Main Benefits

Student use – They like it! After the initial implementation Kloodle usage became habitual for the vast majority of our students, which is great! The Kloodle mobile app was also a huge factor in creating a “Kloodle culture” for students studying at the college! 

Through its dashboard functionality, Kloodle has enabled management of the college to gain insight into the personal development of the student body at department level, course, class and student level. 

Management is also confident that it is able to answer the “how do you know” question during any inspection, as, not only do they have data showing participation levels, but also a plethora of evidence created by learners showcasing their skill- and personal development.

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