Exams officers
Your monthly update (February 2024)
Below you’ll find your monthly update for February 2024, including key upcoming dates for your diary for reasonable adjustments, post-results and assessment and delivery support, and more.
Important reminders
VTQ results – first term-time checkpoint now closed
The first VTQ term-time checkpoint is now closed, and we want to thank you for submitting your information to us. If you haven’t yet completed your check, our team will have been in contact with you. You can also access Ofqual’s VTQ information hub for further support. The next checkpoint will open on 15 April and the deadline for completion will be 3 May.
Find out morePreparing for the delivery of the V Cert Non-Examined Assessments (NEA)
We wanted to remind you of everything we have in place to support you and your learners throughout V Cert assessments. Find out more
AoC Exams Conference, 6-7 March 2024
The AoC Exams Conference will bring together exams professionals from across the sector to discuss the key issues facing the exams office in colleges. With colleges seeing a significant increase in their English and maths retake numbers and the shift to even greater external assessments in Vocational Technical Qualifications the exams function in colleges is facing even more challenges.
We’re excited to be presenting at this event and will share more details on this in the new year. Follow this link to book your place today.
What you need to know for the T Level autumn assessment series
To help you prepare for your students sitting the core exams in the autumn assessment series, we're sharing some useful reminders to help ensure these assessments go smoothly, including how to disable AI tools during assessments. Find out more.
Nominate a colleague for the Support Staff of the Year award in this year’s Aspiration Awards!
This award recognises behind-the-scenes heroes, including Exams Officers, Teaching Assistants, Facilities, Pastoral or Support Staff, who have demonstrated exceptional support inside or outside the classroom, gone above and beyond their roles, and actively pursued opportunities for personal development to provide the best possible support to others. Nominations open on 22 March. Find out more
Bite-size videos to support you
We’ll be creating a series of bite-size videos, some of which are already available on our YouTube channel, detailing some of the common themes or areas of difficulty, and will also provide updates to our Portal User Guide, accordingly.
Supporting administration staff
In acknowledgement of the high turnaround of centre staff dealing with NCFE’s administrative assessment processes, we would request that any centre with new or inexperienced staff, who may require support in enacting any of our Portal-related activities, contact [email protected], where one of the team will be glad to help signpost, integrate or demonstrate these processes directly.
You can find the upcoming post results deadlines for assessments for our CACHE and T Level qualifications in the Key Dates Schedule.
We understand that there are times when a student or provider feels that a result is at variance with their reasonable expectations. Therefore, there is a range of post-results options available to providers to support you and your students.
Requests for reviews of marking or access to scripts can be submitted by the provider on behalf of the student (with their consent), however before doing so, please ensure you’re familiar with our Enquiries about Results and Assessment Decisions Policy.
More information on post-results services can be found here.
Visit our assessment support page where you'll find everything you need to support you with assessment, including policies, forms and guidance on online assessment, remote invigilation, assessment and results queries, appeals, certificates, special considerations, access arrangements and reasonable adjustments, and much more.
Visit our delivery support page where we have over 1000 informative and engaging learning resources. Here, you'll find all you need to deliver our qualifications and support your learners.
View our Qualifications for Specific Delivery (QSID) document which provides qualification-specific instructions relating to the administration of external assessments for NCFE qualifications.
The Exams Office, in conjunction with their training partner Exams Training, offers a range of face-to-face training events delivered by industry experts, supported by high quality resources and held at 4/5-star venues across England. Events are available for:
- Exams officers
- Senior leaders/line managers
- Invigilators.
Learn more about how you can keep up to date with your training
If you require a reasonable adjustment submission and/or paper modification, please ensure they’re booked before the below deadlines:
- Reasonable adjustments (PDF requests, language modifiers and speech recognition): prior to the booking cut-off date
- Paper modifications (braille): 30 working days before the assessment
- Paper modifications (enlarged paper or coloured paper): 15 working days before the assessment
- Reasonable adjustments (practical assistant): one day prior to the assessment
- All other reasonable adjustments: up to the assessment date.
For more information on reasonable adjustments and how to submit an application, visit this page.
You can find the upcoming post results deadlines for assessments for our CACHE and T Level qualifications in the Key Dates Schedule.
