RSL Award’s Centre-Based Vocational Qualifications: Supporting centres and ensuring learners get a fair outcome. 

Here at RSL Awards, our quality assurance (QA) processes are in full flow. We’re working away both behind the scenes and directly with centre staff and teachers to make sure that all the QA activities that are taking place will lead to accurate results that are a fair reflection of your learners’ hard work.

Our team of Centre Quality Assurers (CQAs) were trained in the autumn of last year and are ready to meet with RSL’s new centres to guide them through the centre approval process so that they are well set up to succeed as they take their first steps in delivering our suite of vocational qualifications. Each new centre is visited, and the CQAs will make sure that they know what is required to deliver our centre-based VQs to the high standards that we expect.

Every centre is also supported by the CQA in their annual centre visit. We work with centres ahead of the visit to understand what support is needed, and extra help is targeted at centres that need it most. During the visits, CQAs will look at evidence of the centre’s assessment and IV plans, assignment briefs, and discuss how the centre implements their QA procedures to make sure they meet our high standards.

The next stage is for our Standards Verifiers – previously known as EQAs! – to step in and begin the rewarding task of reviewing each centre’s assessment and QA activities to make sure the agreed standard has been correctly applied. We welcomed our team of SVs, most of whom work in centres that are delivering RSL qualifications, to our HQ recently for a day of intensive training. The SV team were trained by our Senior Subject Experts and spent the day reviewing learner work, centre assessment decisions, and quality assurance paperwork. Having successfully completed training, SVs will be assigned samples from centres to moderate so that we can be sure that standards have been upheld.

Next up, in March it will be the turn of our team of External Assessors (EA) who will be trained to mark the external assessment. We’ll write more about that training nearer the time!