Bradford College

The context

Bradford College has one clear aim: to transform the lives of their students.

They are one of the UK’s largest colleges, helping over 20,000 learners a year achieve their qualifications and take their next steps into education or employment.

Bradford College prides themselves on creating curriculums that support learners to develop professionally and personally and integrates them into the local community. They’ve won awards for their work with both learners and employers, to ensure their learners complete their programmes with knowledge, skills and behaviours to help them succeed in life.

Asa is the Assistant Principal of Further Education. When he joined the college in 2017, he had a clear remit: to build on the college’s reputation of transforming their learners’ lives.

The challenge

Although the college was providing high-quality apprenticeships, support for those with additional cognitive needs was difficult to identify, impacting new apprentices in engaging with employers and developing skills required to progress in their apprenticeship.

With a key focus on providing opportunities for young people, there was a need to increase the amount of support prior to starting an apprenticeship to improve progression into sustained employment.

Bradford College identified Cognassist to help them better understand learner needs and help them provide personalised support from each individual’s starting point, through their apprenticeship to end-point assessment and beyond.

The solution

Using Cognassist, Asa & the Bradford College team can identify and evidence additional learning needs across their entire apprenticeship provision and have now integrated Cognassist into Community Adult provision and Access provision.

The partnership between Bradford College and Cognassist has seen the creation of a bespoke apprenticeship initial assessment centre that supports all apprentices through a range of pre-assessments alongside advice and guidance linked to current apprenticeship opportunities.  The Assessment Centre allows the college to assess learners’ individual needs and create a personalised plan of support that follows the apprentice through their apprenticeship.  The plan is reviewed throughout the apprentice’s journey and forms part of the review process completed by Assessors.

For non-apprenticeship provision, the college has established an assessment process specific to the needs of Adult and Access programmes, with Tutors to support the initial assessment and monitoring engagement and progress throughout their programme.

The outcomes

Cognassist gives Bradford College an accurate way to identify learners with additional needs, and evidence the support they give them. We’ve assessed over 3,000 learners at the college in the last two years and every learner receives our digital cognitive assessment in the Cognassist Lab when they start their programme.

Personalised learner journeys give apprentices and learners access to over 500 media-rich resources that help them understand how they think and learn. Since we started working with Bradford College, we’ve supported their learners to progress in their studies and careers as well as allowing the college to access additional funding that has enabled them to reinvest in support that supports the College’s primary aim to transform lives.

The success of the partnership and the support provided to apprentices is best evidenced through the significant increase in success rate for those requiring additional support. In the 2018/19 contract year, the college saw a 10 % increase in apprenticeship success for those with additional learner needs as recognised in the national apprenticeship rate tables.

Bradford College has been able to increase learner attainment by 10% in the last year. They achieved an 82.1% overall success rate for apprentices identified as requiring additional support, recognised in the National Achievement Rates Tables, placing them in the top 10% of colleges in the country for apprenticeship success.