Moderation - education and early years
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Frequently asked questions for T Level Technical Qualification in Education and Early Years (Level 3) (Delivered by NCFE)
The allocation of moderators is at our discretion. All moderators attend standardisation to ensure consistency across the board. Moderators use the portal to arrange dates, so planning these in advance is helpful. Moderators will work in partnership with you; however, flexibility may be required due to the number of providers that moderators support.
You must assign an assessor, who’ll be responsible for:
- maintaining their CPD to ensure they have a qualification and/or recent occupational experience in the subject area they are assessing – further details of occupational competence requirements can be found in the relevant qualification specification
- where no assessor qualifications are held, providers must ensure adequate staff development to guarantee assessors are working to national standards (for example, attendance at our assessor training events)
- carrying out assessments in accordance with the qualification’s criteria as detailed in the qualification specification
- ensuring student evidence is valid and meets the standards of the qualification
- ensuring students have achieved all learning outcomes related to the unit/qualification being assessed
- providing support and feedback to students throughout the assessment process.
Further details can be found at How to prepare for quality assurance reviews | NCFE | NCFE
General queries about Education and Early Years T Level assessments
The video interview 1 and 2 from the Assessor and Teacher Network will support this:
Education & Early Years Assessor & Teacher Network Dec 23 (youtube.com)
The assessment methods for this qualification are Direct Observation and Professional Discussion only. Students may use a reflective account or refer to work products, such as planning; however, these can only be used to move the discussion on, and must be referred to within the documentation.
We recommend completing all of part one within the assessment window, September-February, so that students can focus on the structured observations and be well prepared to undertake them.
However, part one (EYE only) is ongoing and finishes at the end of the assessment window, so with careful planning, you can continue to assess the remaining EYE part 1 criteria up until the window closes.
Assessors should provide a detailed written narrative of the assessment where the detail recreates the observed activity. Assessors should also include the level of involvement of all children taking part in the activity, as well as examples of direct speech.
We highly recommend audio recording the Professional Discussions, as this gives the most authentic and valid versions and can be very helpful to refer back to when marking the Structured Observations.
The structured observations have been written to reflect realistic and regularly occurring events or activities that will be very likely to take place on the industry placement. As such, no specific timings have been given, but it is expected that both the observation and the Professional Discussion combined should last no longer than an hour.
For EYE part one, there are no specific timings for the observations.
The guidance clearly identifies that criteria must be observed and extended through a Professional Discussion for full or partial achievement. Professional Discussion must not be used as an alternative to observation of the student in placement. We appreciate that some criteria may be best suited to a Professional Discussion, and this applies to situations that are unlikely to be frequently observed. Students may refer to documentation including work products, child observations, planning, reflective accounts, policy and procedures to support Professional Discussions as appropriate.
EYE students are working towards gaining a license to practice. The competency criteria are based upon the skills practitioners have to have in order to gain this license. Students should be showing consistency and progress within their practice. The competency skills allow the students to be well prepared for the Structured Observations, where they can demonstrate the skills that they have developed.
During moderation of part one, the assessor and moderator will discuss and agree all competency criteria. Where it is agreed the student is either competent and/or still working towards the competency skills, the moderation of part one can be signed off.
Where the student is still working towards competency, the assessor should ensure they have met the full criteria in order to sign them off as fully competent. The competency skills can be started in year one and do not have to be signed off until the end of the assignment 2 assessment window.
To clarify, you do not have to wait until year 2 to sign off any or all of the EYE criteria; we strongly recommend students are observed and working towards these in year 1. However, you do need to consider whether they are fully competent in year 1 based on the knowledge and experience they have to fully meet the assessed skills. Also, as moderation only takes place in year 2, there may be some students who may have to repeat competencies for moderation purposes.
Completing NCFE administration and internal standardisation training supports you to ensure you are assessing fairly. For EYE Part 1, moderators will go through assessment decisions, which will also support. Following Structured Observations, all providers will receive a report focusing on strengths and areas of development – this will include where marking differed between moderators and assessors, and feedback should be used to inform future practice.
The Early Years Educator (Level 3) qualifications criteria have been updated, and this will be moderated against in September 2025.
You can use your own activity plan templates, or if you want to use an existing template, there are some best practice examples in the exemplification documents and the employer set project.
Professional Discussions in the Education and Early Years T Level
Where possible, Professional Discussions should be well planned for so that the assessor and student know what criteria they are covering, and the criteria should be read out in full to the student to give them the opportunity to answer what is asked. Further questions can then be asked to clarify their understanding and/or reflect on their practice and direct observation.
For example, if you were discussing 1.7 for Education and Early Years (EYE), we suggest you clearly outline the criteria, so ‘please analyse and explain children's learning and development in relation to their stage of development and individual circumstances’, but you may then ask a further question to ensure that they cover and understand biological and environmental factors, which can also impact on learning and development in children.
Whilst professional discussion can be applied to any of the criteria, it must be noted that observation remains the preferred method and should be prioritised for those criteria identified with the letter S. All professional discussions should make use of the student’s experience in an early years setting, where reflection, testimony or work product have been supplied they must only be used to move a discussion forward.
Professional Discussions should take place directly after the observation so students can contextualise to the activity observed.
Yes. Planning the professional discussions and giving students opportunities to practice them, for example in college with their peers, is crucial and will support time management. For SO3, making use of the ‘walk and talk’ for the health and safety elements and contextualising it to the activity observed should help reduce some discussion time.
1.2/1.3 and 1.7, la (h) are within SO1 and SO3 to ensure that students can demonstrate their understanding of each area contextualised to what has been observed. For example, in 1.2/1.3. child development, we recommend that this is contextualised to what you have observed, so that students talk through the ages/stages across all areas for the age of the children, but then also discuss how they would adapt this for younger and older children, ensuring they include development stages within this. For 1.7 and 1a (h), they would link this to individual children worked with.
We recommend that you refer to the chief moderation report for further guidance and examples in the exemplification and standardisation training.
Yes, however, we recommend that these are not read from verbatim. Students should prepare with notes for prompts rather than full responses.
Structured Observations in the Education and Early Years T Level
The tutor guide for assignment 2 is available here.
We advise justifications are given for each of the criteria. It is beneficial to include the reasoning behind your assessment decisions and any points where you feel the criteria could have been observed/discussed in more depth. This will also ensure that you give purposeful feedback to the students. Using the terminology from the marking bands is also useful.
This should be discussed at a provider level, as planning is key. We recommend booking at least three observations per day. Having good communication with industry placements to support them to understand the importance of the SOs is key. It may be helpful for students to share their planning with their industry placement, to ensure they are fully aware of what they are intending to achieve during the observation. This would allow the industry placement to support the student in the best way possible during the Structured Observation assessment window.
Robust planning and preparation are important. Making sure the students have planned well and are aware of what they need to do/meet in relation to the criteria being covered in each SO is the most effective way of preparing them. Allowing time for mock observations and PDs may also make the process more familiar.
Students should contextualise this to the activity that has taken place.
Our standardisation training pack includes good examples to support the marking process, including justification. Please use this to support your standardisation within your organisation. It can be located within the Portal. For guidance on how to access this resource, please refer to the Portal User Guide.