Our new Education Quality assurance model

We have been running our new quality assurance model for six months, and thought now was a good time to reflect on the achievements and challenges since we went live in September. 

Firstly, we would like to thank our external colleagues and stakeholders for your support. We have received excellent engagement from providers, professional bodies, partners and others. Everyone has consistently strived to understand our aims, work with us in the spirit of the new model, and to provide constructive feedback. 

We feel that we are in a good position to consolidate our achievements moving forward into the second half of this academic year, with the continued support of our stakeholders. 

What has gone well 

We have scaled up our regional approach to stakeholder management. This gives each education provider a named key contact at the HCPC, who is their point of contact for all education quality assurance activity and queries. As part of this we have established contacts at 135 education providers, and regional leads have introduced themselves to define how providers would like us to work with them moving forward. 

We have seen an improvement in the time taken to complete the approval process. We are now delivering outcomes in 6 months on average, which is a marked reduction from around 10 months in the previous model. This helps providers to get new provision up and running more quickly, through our flexible quality assurance requirements. 

We have rolled out performance review requirements to 50 providers, and are directly supporting them to provide good quality submissions. We used insight from data to decide which providers would go through the process first. 

What we need to focus on 

We are working to establish information sharing arrangements with professional bodies, with an aim to improve the quality of education in the professions we regulate, and to reduce burden for education providers where this is possible. We aim to have information sharing arrangements in place with professional bodies from September 2022. 

Linked to the above, we plan to embed further sources of data into our performance data model. We will also start to receive and analyse the next set of data from existing sources, which will allow us to begin to understand trends for providers. 

We are piloting an education provider self-service portal, which will allow providers to access their data, provide documentation, and communicate with us in a consolidated way. We are planning to launch the portal for all education providers in September 2022. 

We are undertaking a full analysis of the model and its performance in this academic year, and will report findings to our Education and Training Committee in September 2022. This will enable us to report on whether our intended goals have been reached, following running the model with all our providers for 12 months.