We take a flexible approach when undertaking our education quality assurance assessment activities, aiming to be ‘right touch’ in our regulatory activities.
This means we consider ‘problems’ before jumping to solutions.
Within our flexible assessments, we work with education providers as early as possible on problems we identify against our standards. All education providers and programmes must meet and maintain our standards of education and training (SETs). We do not apply a one size fits all approach to our assessments – we instead design our ‘quality activities’ based on what we see.
We do this by:
- Asking for a detailed documentary submission mapped to our standards
- Reviewing the submission, and defining the areas which need to explore further
- Designing and undertaking proportionate quality activities, which enable us to explore areas further, and education providers to address areas raised
We undertake a range of quality activities, based on the area we want to explore – first considering the problem and how to best assess. These can range from email responses to queries, documentary evidence, and / or physical or virtual meetings with relevant groups involved in education and training.
Wherever possible, we do not set formal requirements, often referred to as ‘conditions’, towards the end of our regulatory assessments. We find that working with education providers to address issues early in our assessments is beneficial to deliver proportionate and timely outcomes. However, we are robust in our assessments, and we can set formal requirements when issues are not addressed sufficiently through quality activities.
Since introducing our current quality assurance model in September 2021, we have significantly reduced the number of conditions set. This does not mean the quality of our assessments has dropped, rather, we have worked earlier with education providers to solve problems.
You can find out more about our quality assurance principles by visiting our education pages below.
