At the end of the day, all that matters is our students’ happiness, well being and sense of achievement. The rest is academic! We can measure educational achievement via exam results, university entrance, league tables and so forth – and sustaining our number 1 position as the best Independent Sixth Form College in London, for the 14th year in a row, tells us we’re doing pretty well on this front!
However, gauging how happy our students are, and how supported they feel, is trickier to measure. We’re certainly confident that we provide a friendly, warm and nurturing environment, based on mutual respect, but we feel it’s important students have the opportunity to tell us how they feel. Our one-on-one approach provides an on-going forum for students to air their views or concerns, but we thought we’d try and get a broad sweep of student opinion via a new starter survey. So that is what we did.
The results were not just highly reassuring for us, but ones that we’re proud to share. When we asked students to select 5 words to describe Brampton College, the most chosen ones were dedicated, hard working, supportive, friendly and motivating. This tells us we’ve stuck a pretty good balance between driving academic success and providing a supportive and relaxed environment to aid learning and confidence.
When we asked students to qualify their answers by describing how they feel about Brampton now they’ve started with us, these were some of their statements: “The learning environment is helpful and friendly. I prefer it much more than any of my previous schools.” “Brampton has been very helpful and I love it! Wish I had come for the previous year.” “Very supportive”, “I feel motivated.” And indeed, whilst this is very lovely to hear, it is certainly motivating for us too!
