Exams officers

Your monthly update (September 2025) 

Below you’ll find your monthly update for September 2025. 

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Assessments and reviews  

Arrange your External Quality Assurance and Annual Monitoring Reviews (AMRs) as soon as possible 

You can now arrange your external quality assurance reviews for the 2025-26 session by contacting your EQA directly (if you haven’t already done so). Every centre with live registrations will require an Annual Monitoring Review (AMR) this session, and Quality Reviewers are currently organising these if they weren’t booked last year.   

If your centre has multiple accounts but operates as part of a group which has separate AMRs, you may only need one AMR to cover all accounts. If this is not already in place, please contact your allocated Quality Reviewer to discuss.   

Deadline for external quality assurance reviews ahead of summer 2026 results 

If you have learners registered on VTQs, your external quality assurance review will need to take place on or before 30 June 2026, to ensure learners receive their results on Level 3 results day.   

Please keep learner data in the Portal up to date, including planned end dates, and withdraw any learners who are no longer on programme.   

Update your centre contact details   

If any contact details have changes at your centre such as a programme contact, head of centre, or a finance or exams contact, please notify us as soon as possible using our change of centre contact details form. Keeping contact details up to date ensures that EQAs can organise reviews effectively and important updates reach the right people. 

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Instructions for conducting non-exam assessments (NEAs)   

We’ve been working with colleagues across other awarding organisations and JCQ to create instructions for the supervision, marking, internal standardisation, and external moderation of NEAs in centres. You should use these instructions in addition to NCFE instructions (which will always take precedence) when delivering NEAs to ensure compliance with assessment and marking requirements.    

These instructions are applicable from 1 September 2025 and apply to NEAs for the following qualifications:   

• alternative academic qualifications   

• Level 1/2 Technical Awards (V Certs) 

• T Levels.  

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Updated assessment timetable for 2025-26    

We’ve updated our assessment timetable for all V Cert and CACHE qualifications with an assessment for 2025-26 and 2026-27. Follow this link to view the timetable and supporting documentation.    

Since the consultation period and previous version of this document, we’ve:   

• included details of V Cert registration cut-off dates for the next two academic years (please note that the deadline for registrations for summer 2026 is 31 January 2026 but from summer 2027 onwards, the deadline will be 31 January of the first year of the standard two-year delivery of these qualifications)   

• provided clarity that V Cert booking cut-off dates and NEA submission dates are 30 April for the year of assessment. You can find the instructions on our mandatory policies and fees webpage.    

• changed dates for three of our summer 2026 V Cert external assessments to avoid clashes with high-volume GCSE exams.    

The qualifications impacted, and the details of the changes, are as follows:    

*please note this is a change from previous communications  

The above changes should support you in your assessment administration in an already busy period – avoiding clashes and minimising impact on learners – and in most cases, assessments are moving to a later date. Please ensure that your exams administration teams are aware, and these assessment dates are updated in your systems to avoid any potential disadvantage to learners.  

Please also note:  

• All Northern Ireland CACHE qualifications with a summer assessment opportunity have had their summer 2026 results release dates brought forward to 12 June 2026 so that centres can access their learners’ results before the end of the summer term. 

• The vast majority of Level 3 CACHE qualifications with a summer assessment opportunity that had a corresponding results release date occurring after 10 July 2026 have had their summer results release date brought forward to 10 July 2026. This will allow centres additional time to confirm completion of any internally assessed components and, hence, complete certification, in advance of the general Level 3 results release date in August. 

If you have any queries on this, please contact our Assessment Delivery team via email at [email protected]     

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Qualification-specific updates 

• Functional Skills  

• T Levels  

• V Certs.