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Dear Colleague,

We hope the start of the new academic year is going well. In this newsletter you will find all the latest information to support you with the quality assurance of your vocational programmes.

If you have any questions about Quality Assurance, please contact the team via Live Chat or the Pearson Support Portal and, if you are not already a member, hop over and join the QN Community, where we share the latest information and you can network with other BTEC centres.

Features this month include:

The Annual Quality Declaration (AQD) is a requirement for all vocational centres, regardless of the quality assurance model your qualifications fall under. The AQD has been streamlined, so if you deliver multiple qualification types (BTEC, WBL, Functional Skills, Higher Nationals or T Levels), the new declaration will include all requirements in one place, rather than asking centres to complete separate documents.

All centres now have access to the Annual Quality Declaration. Quality Nominees will have received an email to confirm it is available to your centre specifically, and the declaration can be accessed via:

All centres are required to complete the Terms and Conditions, Mandatory Declarations, plus other sections relevant to your centre’s provision. If you only deliver BTEC Level 1–3, the sections required are the Terms and Conditions and Mandatory Declarations. 

The deadline for AQD submission has been extended to 11 November. 

Higher Nationals: the HN section of the AQD will be available from 8 November, and the submission deadline for this section only is 24 February. HN providers should complete the Terms and Conditions, Mandatory Declarations and any other applicable sections by 11 November. 

For support in completing the AQD, visit our Quality Assurance Events webpage where you can book onto the live AQD walkthrough session, and you can also find an AQD on-demand training module. You can find further guidance in the following support articles:

BTEC Lead Internal Verifiers (Level 1 QCF, legacy Tech Awards, BTEC Firsts and BTEC Nationals): the deadline for all Lead IVs to register or reinstate their registration and complete standardisation has been extended to 4 November 2022. To support Lead IVs, please see our new Centre Guide for Lead Internal Verifiers.

The Holistic Review replaces the Lead Standards Verifier Activity; please refer to the Centre Guide to Quality Assurance for further details. We are writing to centres who have been allocated a Centre Assessment Standards Reviewer (CASR) on Monday 31 October. There could be various reasons why a centre has been included in this year’s allocation, but the key thing to be aware of is that this is a supportive measure. Through allocating a BTEC CASR to a centre, our aim is to provide additional support and advice and ensure the smooth running of your BTEC programmes. If you do not receive an email, your centre has not been selected for this activity. Centres not in scope will continue to be supported, where necessary, by the VQAM team.

In response to centre feedback, we have reviewed and improved our BTEC Assessment and IV forms to reduce the administration burden. Please check out the new templates on our BTEC forms and guides page, where you will find the Learner Assessment Submission Declaration, Learner Sample Consent and Lead IV Sample Declaration forms have been removed and the Assessment Record improved to include all declarations in one place. Remember: these are not mandatory to use, but have been created to save you time and effort; if you create your own documents, please ensure the content of our templates are included in your own as a minimum.

Our full schedule of Live Support sessions is now published, including the Standards Verification Process commencing in November. You can book your place on our Quality Assurance Events & Support page. 

The quality assurance process for the new BTEC Tech Awards is different from the legacy Tech Awards. A Programme Lead replaces the Lead Internal Verifier and therefore, registration on the OSCA platform is not needed. Each Tech Award course is required to have a Programme Lead to oversee quality assurance at programme level and to standardise the team before the first PSA marking period to ensure they understand how to mark to national standards. Teams should use the Exemplar Standardisation Materials (ESMs), which you can find in the Course Materials section of each qualification’s webpage.

If you have mid-flight learners on the legacy Tech Awards, please ensure a Lead IV is registered for each programme and the team has been standardised as in past years.

The first Pearson-Set Assignments for the internally assessed components, for moderation in December/January, were released on 3 October. If learners are taking this first assessment series, entries should have been made by 18 October 2022. Centres are free to complete the PSA approximate allocated hours either in one block or with breaks between tasks. Remember to allow time for marking, any resubmission period required, and internal standardisation following assessment before marks and the moderation sample are uploaded by 15 December. Please note, the 15-day resubmission rule does not apply to the new Tech Awards; see the Centre Guide to Quality Assurance for the BTEC Tech Awards 2022, pages 9–10, for further details.

To view the full range of quality assurance support for the BTEC Tech Awards from 2022, please visit the Home of Quality Assurance – BTEC Section to access the Centre Guide to Quality Assurance for the BTEC Tech Awards, the key dates schedule, a range of supporting bitesize videos and an on-demand quality assurance training module for QNs, Programme Leads and Assessors. You can download the new Assessment Record template from the BTEC forms and guides page, and bookmark the FAQs for BTEC Tech Awards 2022 to get updates throughout the year.

For subject-specific support, we are running live, online Getting Started training sessions and Marking and Moderation training sessions throughout October and November; book your place here. If you cannot attend one of the events, you can access the Getting Started training recordings, and we will release recordings of the Marking and Moderation training in the coming weeks. 

You can sign up for the Higher Nationals monthly newsletter here.

Updated Quality Assurance-related guides for 2022/23 are available now on our QN Hub and HN Global.

As the new academic year is underway for many centres, programme teams are advised to carefully monitor student programme plans to ensure that students study the correct mandatory and optional units required to achieve the HNC/ HND award(s). Please contact us if you require any clarification with selecting the correct unit combinations. 

You can find guidance on how to gain approval/re-approval for any of the latest Higher Nationals specifications on our website. 

Our live continuous professional development (CPD) sessions are available for staff either new or looking to expand their knowledge on our BTEC Higher National qualifications. Our training offers support and guidance on the planning, implementation, delivery and assessment of our qualification suite. Available all year round, you can view the Higher National schedule of training sessions on our website. 

We also offer on-demand, self-paced, online short courses on HN Global that provide the opportunity learn new skills.

If your staff are interested in a few elements from different programmes, we can build tailored training sessions (using elements from various programmes) direct to your staff via centre-based (in-house) training at a time and date suitable for your team. For more information, or to request centre-based training, please use our booking form and our professional development training team will be in contact with you to discuss your needs.

The following Work-Based Learning centre guides for 2022/23 and AQD guidance are now available to download from our WBL quality webpage:

Other WBL centre guides will be updated shortly. 

The WBL Lead Standards Verifier role was initially designed to support centres delivering multiple competence-based qualifications, with a roll-on, roll-off delivery model, ensuring a joined-up approach to Quality Assurance (QA), enabling rationalisation of SVs, and to flag any issues ahead of standards verification.

The BTEC qualifications which moved over to the WBL QA model were included within the Lead Standards Verifier model; however, there are a number of centres - schools in particular - who are only delivering one of these BTEC qualifications to an academic cycle, and were therefore not gaining the full benefit of this role. 

To streamline the approach and to reduce the administration burden, centres that are delivering only BTEC qualifications will not be subject to Lead Standards Verifier allocation. Centres will retain their SV(s), who will be their point of contact for any issues with the relevant qualifications. If there is a particular need for an LSV to be allocated, this will be communicated to you. 

Where centres are delivering BTEC qualifications and any competence-based qualifications, a Lead Standards Verifier allocation will remain, and the BTEC qualifications will be included within the review.

This change in approach to streamline LSV allocations affects the following BTEC qualifications:

All T&Cs will be completed via the Annual Quality Declaration for Work-Based Learning qualifications for 2022–23. You may notice that the T&Cs are still listed on Edexcel Online under the NVQ T&Cs tab; we are currently working to remove these, so there is no need to complete this separately.

Programmes under the sector of National Apprenticeship Standards (NAS) Engineering (Knowledge-based) (e.g. knowledge-based Advanced Manufacturing Engineering qualifications), which falls under the Work-Based Learning Quality Assurance (WBL QA) model, will have programme allocations released in November 2022. This is a later release than other programmes under WBL QA, and is intended to better coincide with the schedules our centres adhere to for this sector.

Any programme allocations appearing on Edexcel Online for these programmes will either remain pending until November, or will be pre-allocated to a “dummy” SV named DR TO BE ALLOCATED IN 2022/23. 

No matter whether you deliver BTEC Vocational, WBL, Functional Skills or Higher National qualifications, you will find all the updated Centre Guides on the Home of Quality Assurance webpage under the relevant qualification section.

Please download these and share with your teaching teams to ensure everyone is updated.

Kind regards

Helen, Bill, Liz, Sally, & Sue
Vocational Quality Assurance Managers