Your Progress

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Equality

It is important for quality assurers to fully embrace the Equality Act 2010 as part of your practice. You have to ensure that learners have access to resources, facilities and treated fairly particularly when it comes to assessments. Awarding bodies will want you to make a statement about inclusion and equal opportunities. They might want to know how you are promoting and monitoring equality.

When thinking about equality consider how your organisation and practice satisfies all the protected characteristics. You could start by examining the resources you have in place. Are they offensive, stereotypical or delegatory in any way? Changes will need to be made if you find anything negative.

It is also your task to ensure that your staff embrace equality. You could also consider the timing of workshops or classroom-based work. If you are working in the adult sector, have you considered the needs of all your learners? Other considerations include an understanding of cultural and religious needs. It is quite known that some candidates who are Muslim or Jewish might not want to be doing activities during a Friday afternoon. The same can be said for learners who belong to Jehovah’s witness who might find it hard to attend workshops on a Saturday.

You might also want to ensure there is disabled access and the needs of those with medical needs such as diabetes are addressed during course delivery.

You need to ensure you comply with the law and remember not to over do it which could result in reverse exclusion. For example, teachers spending more time with learners with learning needs at the expensive of those who do not have.

Remember as a quality assurer you have to contribute to the government’s agenda when it comes to promoting minimum core skills (language, literacy, numeracy and information technology). It is not equality to allow your staff to deliver lessons in another language for the simple reason that English is not their first language. It is illegal in the United Kingdom to deliver courses in another language unless it is a languages course and the specification allows this. Only learners in Wales have the opportunity of studying in another language besides English.

When thinking about equality please also consider the Human Rights Act 1998 and its principles. You also need to consider aspect such as safeguarding. How are you protecting your young learners? How have you also address the PREVENT agenda in your work setting?

Intellectual Properties

Another important work of a quality assurer concerns the need to protect copyrights and ensure sources are acknowledged. You need to have systems in place to detect plagiarism and ensure learners are not cheating their way into getting qualifications. It is important for you to ensure learners understand the need to use and the importance of references. This will

Please provide information about referencing earlier on during induction and throughout the course. Ii is easier when you make links to the course specification and any other requirements. For example, the QCF Framework does have some descriptors that require learners studying at level five to be proficient in Harvard Referencing by the end of the course. It will be good if you have a system which includes a warning system to give learners the chance to learn from their mistakes and hopefully value the need to acknowledge sources and intellectual property.

Assessors should be encouraged to use services such as Turnitin and Grammarly. A simple google check can also identify sources used by learners. Please make some checks during sampling just in case your assessors have failed to detect plagiarism. The worst thing will be for an external quality assurer to detect this for you which will simply prove that your systems are not robust enough. Remember when sampling, you are not only monitoring the quality of evidence and assessment but also looking for potential areas of development for your assessors.

There is a massive temptation for learners these days to tap into a lot of information found on the internet. Websites offering write up services have increased this temptation and have made the job of ensuring authenticity of evidence more difficult. Awarding bodies and regulators such as Ofsted treat learners who plagiarise as cheats.

It is also important to ensure resources being used by your staff and learners respect intellectual property in line with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. It is both unprofessional and embarrassing for you to fail to be role models when it comes to copyrights. Reminds me of a recent story in the press when a teacher used some handout borrowed from an American website which had content not suitable for school children. What an epic fail of quality assurance?