David LeFeuvre – Lecturer in Construction & the Built Environment
Q. What have you gained from being involved with the programme?
A. I have gained confidence
with delivering skills to my learners, breaking down the core competencies that learners need to have before you can move on. I have also gained a deeper understanding of how you can develop learners to support them moving from competence to excellence.
Q. In what ways have you seen an impact with your learners?
A. We completed pressure tests for a couple of units ahead of final exams and for those units where we did this, we achieved some of the highest scores and overall best results we ever have.
The work we did on resilience, simulation of test conditions, mental attitude and understanding how to get yourself out of a negative loop really paid off.
Beauty Therapy Level 3 learner
Q. What value did you gain from completing a pressure test. What did you learn?
A. The biggest thing I learnt from completing a pressure test was resilience as there were a few hurdles that I faced, but I had learnt how to mentally overcome them. We have completed several pressure tests, each one more difficult than the previous. During one of them, we had an employer judge us and offer developmental feedback.
Sir Paul Philips, Principal and Chief Executive
Q. How have you implemented the WorldSkills UK pedagogical approaches to curriculum and quality processes across the college?
We decided to triangulate our approach ensuring curriculum, quality and leadership were at the centre of our dissemination to staff.
We created curiosity through the Quality Teams and introduced WorldSkills UK methodologies highlighting practices that could further enhance the quality of TLA across the whole college group. With our Quality Team enthused, we organised a large CPD event focusing on teaching beyond the curriculum where faculties were introduced to the “Competence to Excellence” pedagogical approaches.
The emphasis was on a change of mindset not more workload.
Our governing body took great interest and supported us to develop further CPD opportunities to disseminate and cascade the WorldSkills UK pedagogy, this time widening our reach to HE educators.
We are now in a position where the Competence to Excellence concept is embedded into the curriculum and pressure tests are tools that support diagnostic testing.
