T Level autumn assessment series – what you need to know

Reasonable adjustments can reduce the effect of a disability or difficulty that will otherwise place a student at a substantial disadvantage during an assessment. Reasonable adjustments must be put in place before the assessment and should be declared at the point of registration. For external assessments, these can be added to the Portal up to the date of the assessment. For internal assessments (moderation), you must record any reasonable adjustments on the evidence upload checklist required per student and submit the JCQ form VQ/IA for inspection during the moderation process.   

Special considerations are intended to support students who face an unexpected disadvantage at the time of an assessment for reasons outside of their control. Requests for special considerations can be made after an assessment. The deadline for making these requests is five working days following the date of the assessment or the last day of a window if that is sooner. 

Core exams key reminders 

• You can now decouple the two core sub-component (core exams and ESP) so that students do not need to sit both in the same series. However, to receive a core component result, students will still have to sit both the core exams and ESP before they can certificate. 

• As a reminder, students must complete both core papers A and B in the same series for all attempts, with a core exam sub-component result based on the combined outcomes within a series. They can’t split their attempts on each paper across different series, or resit just one of the two core exam papers.  

• These assessments need to be completed under invigilated conditions, following our Regulations for the Conduct of External Assessments. You can find these regulations on this webpage. 

• Please ensure you've requested the correct access arrangements for your students on registration in our Portal before the assessment. If you haven’t requested extra time for pupils who require it, please ensure to do this via the Portal no later than 24 hours before the date of the assessment. You can find details of how to do this in our Portal User Guide. 

• You should visit the NCFE Portal to confirm your students are booked onto the paper-based assessments and the online assessments as appropriate. 

• Please remind your students and colleagues that if they see claims on social media offering this year’s assessment questions or papers, they should ignore them. These papers will almost certainly be fake, but even accessing fake materials could result in an investigation and possible disqualification. Please notify NCFE immediately if you have any concerns about questions or assessment papers being shared within your cohort. 
• View our top tips for preparing for core exams here.

Invigilated assessments 

• For these assessments, we’d like to remind you that there is a 30-minute flexible window on the start time (as stated in the Key Dates Schedule) with no requirement to notify us in advance. You can submit an assessment variation request for our approval if the 30-minute flexibility is insufficient. 

Paper-based assessments 

If your students are sitting paper-based assessments the papers will arrive by courier: 

• You should receive the papers three working days before the date of the assessment. If you’re not available for any reason, there will be further delivery attempts each subsequent working day until the day of the assessment if necessary. 

• You must store and handle papers securely, in accordance with our Regulations for the Conduct of External Assessments. You can find these regulations on this webpage. 

• You must return papers using the Yellow Label service. Papers must be returned after each assessment, and you should not, for example, retain paper A papers to return alongside paper B papers. There is no need to return unused assessment papers. 

Online assessments 

If your students are sitting assessments online: 

• Read the Surpass User Guide to understand how it works and get a comprehensive understanding of how to navigate Surpass effectively. 

• Make sure the learner interface, SecureClient, is installed and tested on your devices well in advance to allow time for testing before the live assessment date. Please note, due to a system upgrade, Secure Client will not launch if the desktop version of Grammarly is running on the device. If Grammarly is on the device, you will need to close or uninstall it before launching SecureClient. See our guidance on disabling AI apps.  

• You must familiarise yourself with our policies and procedures around the use of internet tools, particularly ones that use Artificial Intelligence (AI), that could provide pupils with an unfair advantage in online assessments. This could result in investigation, sanctions, and the possible disqualification of students from external assessments. Read the guidance. 

• You’ll need a keycode for each student sitting an online assessment. These keycodes will be available from the ‘Invigilate’ screen in Surpass 120 hours (5 days) before the assessment is due to take place. 

• If you have requested extra time using the process outlined in our Portal User Guide, you can check whether it has been given for any relevant students by viewing the duration column in the ‘Invigilate’ screen. 

• If the extra time has not been applied, you can do this directly in the ‘Invigilate’ screen, selecting the learner and clicking the ‘modify duration’ button. This must only be applied for eligible students who have had a formal assessment of need completed before the assessment, and this is their usual way of working. 

• Please ensure that you’re aware of the start time of the assessment as this must be adhered to (with an allowance to start up to 30 minutes before or after this time, as per our regulations). The ‘Invigilate’ screen in Surpass will show that the assessment can be started between 8am and 4pm. This is not a variation to the set start time, or to allow an assessment to begin at any point in this window; this is to ensure that if you experience technical issues that are not resolved by 10:30am, you can have more time to manage and resolve them. If you’ve been unable to begin an assessment by 10:30am due to technical issues, please contact our T Level Customer Support team via [email protected]. 

Instructions for centres who have chosen to download the assessment within Surpass (so that students can sit the paper offline within the Surpass software): 

• You must upload the students’ assessments to NCFE within 24 hours of the session finishing. If assessments are not uploaded within 24 hours, students may be treated as a ‘did not attend’, potentially impacting results. 

• To upload assessments, you must open the SecureClient software on the device used for the assessment and connect to the internet. The system will automatically upload the assessment(s). This may take up to a few minutes depending on the number of assessments uploading and the speed of your internet connection. 

• When the upload is complete, please close the SecureClient software. 

• You can check the status of the assessment on the Surpass ‘Invigilate’ screen: if the assessment has been uploaded, you’ll see a green tick to show it has uploaded. 

• If any of your assessments do not upload, please contact our Customer Support team immediately by emailing [email protected].  

We wanted to share some details about the autumn assessment series that will be important for you if you have students booked for the Employer Set Project (ESP).  

Pre-assessment information including key dates 

• You can access assessment material digitally via the NCFE Portal. This will be available three working days prior to the assessment, unless otherwise specified in the Key Dates Schedule. These materials will include advanced assessment materials where available, and provider guides including checklists to support you with evidence upload. 
  
• Please ensure you check the Key Dates Schedule and provider guides for requirements and completion deadlines, as some pathways have specified dates and times for tasks within the window. 
  
  
• You should test recording equipment prior to assessments to ensure there are no issues on the day. You should also have back-up systems and processes in place to ensure recordings are carried out, saved and stored securely. Please contact us immediately on [email protected] if you encounter any issues.
  
• We want to remind you that all T Level assessments should be completed independently by students, demonstrating their own knowledge and understanding. Where AI is misused, students may be investigated for malpractice and maladministration.  
  
  
• Our Qualification Specific Instructions for Delivery (QSID) document and our upload guidance document show the acceptable file types. Incompatible file types will generate an error message at the point of upload. 

*Please refer to Key Dates Schedule for details of individual tasks/assignments required for this assessment. 

Post-assessment – evidence upload 

Below we’ve set out the steps to take, and the guidance to follow, to ensure uploading evidence for the ESP is as smooth and seamless as possible for you and your colleagues.  

When to upload evidence 

• Evidence must be uploaded three working days after the closure of the assessment window. After this date, the Portal will lock, and uploads can only be made by exception. 

• If your students were booked onto the ESP this series but will not complete it, please ensure you’ve notified us by submitting a completed and signed invigilator’s register, also uploaded via the Portal. 

Where to upload evidence 

• The location for evidence upload is within the NCFE Portal. To upload evidence, please navigate to the Upload Learner Submissions option from the Bookings menu. This will open a screen allowing you to search for students by assessment, batch, name, ULN, or a number of other options. 

• You’ll only be able to upload evidence for students with a booking. If a student has no booking, please contact our Customer Support team at [email protected].  Don’t attempt to upload their evidence against a different student. 

 How to upload 

• Once an assessment is selected, the menu can be expanded to show all students booked onto that assessment in your centre. 

• Select the upload button on the far right of a student record and this will open the option for uploading, or deleting, files for this student. 

• Select the view submission button to review what has been uploaded. 

• Files can be uploaded one by one, or up to 10 at a time, for each individual student. We strongly advise that files are no larger than 1GB. Larger files will take longer to upload. The maximum individual file size is 2GB, and you will receive an error message for files larger than 2GB. Our upload guidance document shows how to manage file sizes. 

• Once all files are uploaded for a student, the files must be submitted to us. This is done by clicking the submit for marking button and confirming the declaration. 

 What to upload 

• Evidence requirements are outlined in the assessment brief for students, and the checklists available alongside them. 

• Students’ evidence must be clearly labelled following the prescribed naming conventions within the assessment brief, or the Qualification Specific Instructions for Delivery (QSID) document. 

• At batch level, a completed and signed invigilator’s register must also be uploaded. 

• All students must complete a declaration form (known as an External Assessment Cover Sheet, or EACS) for ESP assessments. However, it’s no longer mandatory to upload these to NCFE alongside assessment materials. You must still ensure they are completed, stored securely, and presented to us if requested.  

 Upload checks 

• After uploading, but before submission to us, we strongly recommend that you check that all files you intended to be uploaded are present for each student. This can be done by clicking the view submission button, and this is also an opportunity to remove or amend files prior to submission. 

• We’ll check the evidence after it has been uploaded, and if necessary, we’ll let you know if there’s any missing or corrupt evidence or if there are any other problems with the evidence you’ve uploaded. We’ll apply strict timescales to our review and response, minimising any risk to students’ results. 

 Troubleshooting  

• Last year, we made improvements to the Portal to support you through the upload process. These included: 

• • a progress bar for uploads to show the percentage of evidence uploaded 

• • confirmation once a file has been successfully uploaded 

• • an error message to show if a file has failed to upload. 

This will help give further reassurance that files have been successfully uploaded, or flag issues indicating you need to retry your upload. 

• We’ve reviewed our Portal capacity and upload speeds to make uploading as efficient as possible for you, but upload speeds can still be influenced by file size and your own local internet speed, as well as traffic to the Portal during busy periods. Please be patient when larger files are taking longer to upload, and retry if they fail. The smaller the file, the faster the upload, so we always encourage you to avoid creating unnecessarily large files. 

• If you’re experiencing technical difficulties when uploading evidence, please email [email protected] as soon as possible so we can support you in resolving any challenges. If you have any other queries, please contact our Customer Support team at [email protected]. 

 Why do I need to upload evidence? 

Failure to do this may result in potential maladministration action and will be referred to our Provider Assurance team for further review. It also may impact final moderation and delay students’ results.    

Results for the T Level autumn assessment series will be released to providers on Wednesday 19 March 2025, ready for students receiving them on Thursday 20 March 2025. 

Our full range of post-results services will be available after results are released, find out more.

We’re here to support you every step of the way with the autumn assessment series. If you have queries before or issues during or after an assessment, you can contact us by email at [email protected], or by phone at 0191 240 8862.