To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking with the Institute of Apprenticeships to ensure that the required end-point assessments are available for new apprenticeships without delay.
Answered on
4 March 2019
The Institute of Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfA) works with employer trailblazer groups to understand the requirements of developing end-point assessment materials and to design assessment plans that end-point assessment organisations are able to work with to deliver high quality and consistent end-point assessment.
The IfA also works with the Education and Skills Funding Agency to make sure that there is appropriate coverage of apprenticeships assessment across all standards, including by working with a wide variety of organisations to stimulate provision. The register of end-point assessment organisations is always open and there are 215 organisations currently on the register. As new standards are developed, we continue to work with the sector to make sure that new and existing end-point assessment organisations are aware of the opportunity and can apply to the register for employers to select them.
We are working with the IfA and external quality assurance providers to monitor the progress of organisations once they are approved on the register and to quality-assure the materials and assessment instruments they produce prior to first use. This monitoring will, alongside our improvements to data reporting, give us a clearer picture of market capacity and help apprentices to prepare for their end-point assessment.