We emailed education providers due their performance review in 2023-24 in late June.
Providers who will undergo the process this year (2023-24) will have been given specific requirements and a key contact to work with at the HCPC. We contacted your quality assurance contact, who will coordinate internally on returning an institution-wide return. If you have not heard from us directly, you do not need to contact us.
As part of the review, we will ask you to reflect on several key thematic areas from an institutional perspective. We aim to support you to perform well through this process and mean for it to be a positive experience. We will recognise good performance and apply a reduced level of scrutiny where we are able to do so.
We have the following support materials available for you – some of which may or may not be relevant to you, depending on your role:
- A process overview document and an e-learning module, which lay out the performance review process at a high level;
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Detailed guidance about the submission of your portfolio on the portfolio document (supplied to your quality assurance contact);
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A dedicated section of our website focused on maintaining approval;
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Webinars which focused on the process, with the aim to help you understand what you need to do - a recording and slides from this webinar are available for you to review;
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A dedicated section of our website focused on how we use data through our processes;
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Process stage guidance, which will be provided throughout the year.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Our standards of education and training are outcome focused, to ensure those who complete programmes meet our proficiency standards. Through this process, we are considering your performance. Ultimately, this enables us to make a judgement about continued alignment with our standards. When assessing risk, we have this in mind – are there potential issues with learners meeting the proficiency standards?
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We ask that you reflect at the institution level wherever possible. We are primarily interested in the quality of your HCPC programmes, but things that happen at the institution level will impact on that quality so should be reflected on through your portfolio.
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Your HCPC contact will review your portfolio for completeness and understanding. We will then pass this to a team of professional experts who come to conclusions against the quality themes. We also engage a service user expert advisor to review service user areas.
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Not as standard, but this is an option should the situation require it. We design quality assurance activities based on what we see. We will always prefer the least burdensome option for our stakeholders, but there are times when the only way of fully exploring a quality theme is to visit your institution. When designing quality activities, we will work with you to consider the most effective way of addressing areas.
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You should speak to your HCPC contact. We have provided a bespoke portfolio based on our understanding of your institution, but recognise that not all already may be relevant. We may be able to remove areas from your required return, or help you to understand how you can reflect on the areas noted.
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We’ve deliberately included this for all pre-registration Higher Education Institutions in England, regardless of whether you currently deliver apprenticeship programmes or not. This is because there are still likely relevant reflections you can make based on what is happening in your region, provider, or profession.
For example, you may be considering delivering apprenticeship programmes in the future, you may be involved in trailblazer groups and their ongoing work, and / or there may be impact of other apprenticeship programmes within your region (for example, on placement supply). We consider this is an important area for you to reflecting on linked to the sustainability or your provision.
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We've provided guidance about this in the portfolio submission, but haven't provided a 'level' to reach. This is because the level needed will depend on what's happened at the institution - for example, you may have had professional body reviews in the review period, you may not have. The important thing to do in these situations is to reflect as appropriate to what's happened, to enable external people to understand what's happened and what you have learned.
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You can cross reference between sections, but our intention is that sections do not crossover wherever possible. If you can, only report an area within one theme. For example, you may have reflections about your use of technology which are linked to your response to COVID – you should only report this area in one of the two themes. The important thing is to provide the reflection, rather than where that reflection is contained.
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Yes – but please ensure you only give us information which is relevant to your submission. This means not providing whole documents in most instances. We would prefer you to provide extracts or quotes within your portfolio submission. We do not need to see lots of documentation for context, information should be relevant to your reflections.
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The key themes within the revised SOPs should be covered at the institution level wherever possible. We recognise that you will often have institution-wide approaches to reviewing your curricula, and therefore you should focus at this level where you can.
We also ask for specific reflection at a programme level, which will likely include some reflection on the profession specific changes – however we do not ask for mapping to the revised SOPs or tracked changes versions of your module descriptors.
Related guidance for education providers:
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The key themes within the revised standards of conduct, performance and ethics should be covered at the institution level wherever possible. We recognise that you will often have institution-wide approaches to reviewing your curricula, and therefore you should focus at this level where you can.
We also ask for specific reflection of changes made – however we do not ask for mapping to the revised standards or tracked changes versions of your module descriptors.
Related guidance for education providers:
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To remain confident with provider performance, we rely on regular supply of data and intelligence to help us understand provider performance outside of the periods where we directly engage with them, but we recognise that not all providers will be included in the external data returns we use.
Through the performance review process, where we have gaps in data, we would like to work with providers to establish regular data reporting to the HCPC to satisfy our normative requirements.
Where risk assessment allows, we will lengthen the period between performance review engagements from two years (which is the historical norm for the HCPC), up to a maximum of five years. Where sufficient data points are not available, the maximum length of time we will allow between performance review engagements will be two years. This is so we can continue to understand risks in an ongoing way where data is not available.
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Your institution’s portfolio is available on the education provider self-service portal. We have produced guidance about how to access the portal.
You only need to directly access the portal if you are co-ordinating the return from your institution. Please ensure you are approaching this process from an institution perspective, by talking to relevant colleagues internally.
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Yes. From the academic year 2024-25, we are asking education providers to review, and if necessary, update their institution baseline document as part of engaging with the performance review process. We will supply the original document along the portfolio template document.
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We recommend the process is led by one or two individuals who can lead the production of the portfolio. This might include setting expectations of others, compiling information, reflections, and input from each of the different programmes involved in the review. This helps to ensure the portfolio is approached from an institutional perspective and allows common themes to be grouped together.
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No – your programmes are approved. This process is to consider your performance in delivering HCPC-approved education and training.
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Yes – we suggest drafting one or two portfolio sections early, and then presenting these to us for feedback. Providers have found this a useful exercise to ensure they are producing portfolios in a helpful format for us to review.