Exams officers
Your monthly update (October 2024)
Below you’ll find your monthly update for September 2024, including key upcoming dates for your diary for reasonable adjustments, post-results and assessment and delivery support, and more.
Important reminders
Key dates and timetables
Register your learners
Please ensure to register your learners within 90 days of their start date to avoid late registration fees, and add your learners’ correct end dates at the point of registration.
External Quality Assurance (EQA) reviews
From summer 2025 onwards, we’re bringing forwards the completion date for EQA reviews to 30 June. To find out more about this or if you have any queries, please contact [email protected].
Updated assessment timetable for 2024-25
We’ve updated our assessment timetable for all CACHE and V Cert qualifications with assessments in 2024-25 and 2025-26. Click here to view the timetable and supporting documentation.
Complete your Annual Monitoring Review (AMR) self-assessment form
Last month, your Quality Reviewer (QR) will have confirmed the date of your AMR for this session and given you a link to a self-assessment declaration. This should be completed and returned within 10 working days. The final deadline for all forms to be returned is 14 October.
Important reminders
If any contact details have changed at your centre such as programme contact, head of centre, finance or exams contact, it’s important to let us know. It’s quick and easy to notify us by filling in this form which will allow us to continue communicating important updates to the correct individuals.
T Levels
- We’ve aligned our Special Considerations Policy with JCQ’s, and all applications made will now be under this policy. As a result, we’ll be removing links to our current policy in the coming weeks and replacing them with the JCQ criteria under NCFE branding. Please familiarise yourself with JCQ’s policy.
V Certs
- Our 2024-25 V Cert Non-Exam Assessment (NEA) brief was released on 1 October. Find out more.
- Our standardisation pack is also now available on the Portal, and you must complete the relevant training by 28 February 2025. These training materials support your delivery teams by looking in more detail at the NEA tutor guidance document and marking bands. These will support you to feel confident that you’re marking consistently and are prepared in advance for the 2024-25 assessment window.
- Complete our administration training alongside the standardisation pack materials by 28 February 2025.
Functional Skills
- Take a look at our schedule for introducing new Functional Skills assessment papers.
- Our online assessment supplier, Surpass, provides a Test Centre Network allowing learners to sit onscreen Functional Skills assessments in fully-invigilated and assessment-ready testing centre facilities. Complete this form to register your centre’s interest.
- Entry Level maths vocabulary lists for assessors are now available upon booking for all assessments. These will help to help prepare your learners for the vocabulary associated with the contexts within the assessments. Find out more.
- View the latest practice papers for Functional Skills English. Each paper has been carefully chosen by our Assessment team to provide an authentic assessment experience. Find out more.
Changes to fees for CACHE qualifications
Find out more about fees that are applied if learners are booked under incorrect themes on our CACHE qualifications.
Upcoming events
Delivery support events
Sign up to delivery support events for V Certs from our Provider Development team, which provide opportunities for networking, and explore topics such as preparing to teach and preparing to assess.
Functional Skills
All of our live English and maths training events for the autumn term are now ready for registration. You can also register for our Digital Functional Skills and Essential Digital Skills training events and drop-in clinics to answer any queries and support your onboarding.
New Assessor and Internal quality assurance (IQA) training
We’ve got several new upcoming Assessor and IQA training events, which provide a great opportunity to meet like-minded assessment and IQA professionals. Explore these to expand your knowledge and understanding of IQA, assessment, and our qualifications. Book onto our Assessor or IQA events today.
NCFE’s Professional Development Week
Our second NCFE Professional Development Week took place in July with recap sessions available here. Save the date for our third upcoming Professional Development Week - from 16-20 December - packed with useful sessions for your personal development.
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. These detail some common themes or areas of difficulty and will also provide updates about our Portal User Guide.
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]. Here, one of our 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.
