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In this month’s edition, we're bringing you the latest updates, including important deadlines, new support materials, and resources for both teachers and exams officers. We’d also like to welcome all our new schools that have recently joined us to deliver BTEC Tech Awards. If you’d like to explore our support for teachers and exams officers, you can jump straight to our support for new centres section of the newsletter to get started.

Important! Our withdrawal deadline has been moved this year from January to 31 December. 

Read our full key date schedule for 2024/25

Earlier this week we have contacted all centres that are delivering external assessments in January, asking you to complete a short confirmation by 29 November, to confirm you understand the terminal rule ahead of the January series.

The terminal assessment rule requires learners to take the external assessment at the end of their qualification (the series in which the learner certificates). This means that learners must sit internal component assessments either prior to or in the same series as the external assessment to fulfil this terminal rule. If a learner chooses to retake an internal assessment in a series after they sat the terminal external assessment, they will also need to re-sit the external component to satisfy the terminal rule.  

Learners are allowed one retake of each internal component, and one re-sit of the external assessment within the programme.

To help you understand the terminal rule, we’ve created a new scenario based quick quide that you can use to help you plan your learners path to certification.

Explore out new terminal rule scenario guide

We are also running a terminal rule Q&A and all centres are welcome to join us. Don’t worry if you can’t make it, we’ll be recording the event and sharing that with you. 

After listening to your feedback, the moderator feedback reports you’ll receive following the moderation of PSAs completed in December/January will be available to download directly from Edexcel Online.  

Read our guide to accessing your moderator feedback report

As soon as your initial moderator feedback report is ready to download, a notification email will be sent to your Exams Manager, Exams Officer and Exams Assistant and Quality Nominee to let them know. They’ll then be able to download this in Edexcel Online and forward to anyone who needs to review this. Your final moderator report will be published and accessible from Edexcel Online on results day as usual. 

We are enhancing your moderator feedback reports to make them clearer and more consistent, based on your feedback. From this December/January series, you’ll notice a more uniform structure used across all subjects, a glossary of terms to make reports easier to understand, and a guidance video that will help you put the feedback into practice. We hope you’ll find these improvements useful and look forward to hearing what you think.

Although the deadline for mark submission and to upload your sampled learner work is the 15 December, there is no need to wait. If you have learner work ready, learner work transfer is now open and ready for submissions. Remember, we can only provide your initial draft moderator report in good time if you meet this deadline.

Read our guide to Learner Work Transfer to find out more.  

We have published new exemplar standardisation materials (ESMs) for the internal components. We add new ESMs after every assessment series to give you additional fresh examples based on the most recent Pearson Set Assignments. Be sure to review them to support you in your marking.
You can download these from each subject’s course materials page, under teaching and learning materials.

We host a monthly exams officer webinar, where we’ll always have BTEC Tech Awards on the agenda. Providing you with the latest news and updates, and the upcoming tasks and deadlines.

Register for our next exams officer webinar | 12 December 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Teachers

If you are a teacher who is new to delivering BTEC Tech Awards this academic year, we’ve rounded up all the support we have available to get you started. Remember, if there’s anything you need help with you can contact us through the Pearson support portal and we’ll be happy to help.

Your key resources are all accessible from the ‘Course Materials’ and ‘Training’ tabs at the top of your subject’s qualification page, which you can find from our BTEC Tech Award web pages. On the course materials tab under the ‘teaching and learning materials’ category, you’ll find Teacher Guides, Transition Guides, Exemplar Standardisation Materials and more.

Our live training events cover: 

Recordings of past training events as well as bitesize videos are available from the Training webpage if you can’t attend the live events. 

Exams officers

If you are an Exams officer administrating the BTEC Tech Awards for the first time, head over to out Exams Officer Guidance Page. This is a handy reference page with key information, links to Key documents and a step-by-step guide to registrations, entries, assessment, results and certification.

Quality Nominees

Explore out Quality Assurance Page which includes key Quality Assurance guides, quick guides, bitesize videos and live ‘Catch-ups’ schedule.

Subject Advisors

Experts in their fields, and many of them former teachers, our subject advisors are here to support you throughout the year and can help with all your subject-specific queries. You can contact our Subject Advisors by email, book a short meeting and sign up for Subject Advisor updates. Meet our subject advisors here.

While we’ll be sending this directly to you every month, there’s a wealth of support available on our website. Bookmark our BTEC Tech Awards FAQ webpage, where we’ll keep you updated.

As always, we’re here to help you, so if you have any questions, please contact us via the Pearson support portal.

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