Notice to centres regarding the removal of Direct Claims Status from 1 August 2021

Ofqual announced in September 2019 that all Awarding Organisations (AOs) will be required to introduce a Centre Assessment Standards Scrutiny (CASS) strategy no later than September 2021. This approach forms part of Ofqual’s overall strategy to improve the controls AOs have in place where an assessment is marked by a centre (Condition H2).

AOs need to determine the most appropriate CASS approach for each of their qualifications and must meet Ofqual’s minimum requirements. One specific form of CASS is moderation and Ofqual has defined some qualifications will always be subject to moderation (such as GCSEs, A levels and Technical Qualifications).

Moderation is defined as per the new CASS as:

A particular form of Centre Assessment Standards Scrutiny through which the marking of assessments by Centres is monitored to make sure it meets required standards and through which adjustments to a Centre’s marking are made, where required, to ensure that results are based on the required standard. Moderation takes place before final results are issued under Condition H6.1.

There are other forms of CASS which involve periodically checking the marking of an assessment by a centre either before results are issued, after results are issued or a combination of these which relates to Direct Claims Status (DCS).

To be proactive in our approach to these changes we have started to review our portfolio of qualifications to identify whether other qualifications should be subject to moderation.

Following our review, we’ve made the decision that DCS will be removed from the qualifications below from 1 August 2021.

We understand that you may have some concerns regarding how this will affect the certification of your learners and to support you with this we will:

• ensure EQAs action certificate claims within 3 working days
• ensure we have sufficient EQA resource in place across the country to support centres (which will be reviewed regularly).

If you have any queries regarding this change, please contact your EQA or you can email the External Quality Assurance team at [email protected].