Exams officers

Your monthly update (January 2024)

Below you’ll find your monthly update for January 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 open now

Find out what actions you need to take before 9 February 2024 to ensure your VTQ learners receive timely results this year.

Find out more

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 January. Find out more.

National Exams Officer Conferences

We’ll be delivering an interactive workshop, seeking resolutions to your queries and providing hints and tips, for centre staff interacting with our Portal, in upcoming Exams Office Conference events in London (29 and 30 January) and Manchester (5 February). For more information on the Exams Office, their events, support and resources, click here.

The content for this workshop will include NCFE portal functionality in general but will also discuss term-time checking processes for learners intending to progress to further studies, and any issues centres may have with the upload of digital evidence, following an NCFE assessment.

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.

Assessments

You can find the upcoming post results deadlines for assessments for our CACHE and T Level qualifications in the Key Dates Schedule.

Access the Key Dates Schedule.

Post results services

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.

Assessment support

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.

Delivery support

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.

Qualifications for Specific Delivery (QSID)

View our Qualifications for Specific Delivery (QSID) document which provides qualification-specific instructions relating to the administration of external assessments for NCFE qualifications.

Exams officer training

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

Reasonable adjustment timescales

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.

Results

You can find the upcoming post results deadlines for assessments for our CACHE and T Level qualifications in the Key Dates Schedule.

Access the Key Dates Schedule.