Quality Assurance Team

The Quality Assurance team is responsible for managing and maintaining the integrity of the assessment processes of all NCFE and CACHE qualifications, both in-house and at our approved centres.

The team is split into the below sub teams:

Assessment Delivery is managed by Alex Burdon and they are responsible for the external assessment element of our qualifications.  This involves dispatching assessment papers, marking and releasing results for our qualifications with external assessment. The team is also responsible for the recruitment and training of Examiners as well as monitoring and intervening to improve their quality of work.  Assessment Delivery are responsible for ensuring external assessments are carried out under the appropriate conditions including the leadership of visits to centres by Assessment Audit Advisors.

The External Quality Assurance (EQA) team is managed by Kay Barrass and is responsible for the quality assurance of all internally assessed products. This includes centre approval, centre monitoring and evaluation. We are responsible for the recruitment, training and performance of our External Quality Assurers who carry out this centre monitoring. Our team can be contacted via the following mailboxes depending on your query:

• EQA (EQA management/ EQA monitoring reviews): [email protected]
• Approvals (New centre approvals and additional product requests): [email protected]
• Events (National assessor and IQA training or Bespoke Training [email protected]

The POUAT (Product Owner & User Acceptance Testing) team are responsible for some of NCFE's platforms and managing relationships with the 3^rd party suppliers who own those platforms. The main ones we’re responsible for are the NCFE Portal and the NCFE Online Assessment platform (Surpass owned by BTL). We also manage the relationship with Adare who print our certificates.

We oversee the day to day running of these platforms, and the team support the main functions of the platforms (eg managing certification, online assessments). We work with colleagues across the business to ensure training is available and knowledge is up to date, and we maintain customer facing and internal colleague documentation. We work on any developments and maintenance needed on those platforms and address issues or bugs that may occur.

We work with the 3^rd party suppliers on a daily basis and have regular service review meetings to ensure the platforms and the service is performing as it should. We’re involved in developments and changes to the platforms and stay engaged with the suppliers to ensure we’re involved in those developments and changes, and to ensure they’re fit for purpose for NCFE and our customers.

Customer Compliance & Investigations is managed by Vicki Metcalf and is responsible for ensuring Customer Quality Standards have been met and investigating any allegations of failures. Where issues are identified which indicate that centre quality standards have not been met, the Customer Compliance team will undertake a review to determine the facts.  If this information indicates malpractice or maladministration has taken place then a formal investigation is launched to work out what has happened and how we can put things right to ensure the learner experience and our reputation is not put at risk.

Product Owner & User Acceptance Testing

Customer Compliance & Investigations