Key dates and deadlines
Please ensure you check our Key Dates Schedule for a reminder of set date and time core exam dates.
General reminders
- These assessments need to be completed under invigilated conditions, following our Regulations for the Conduct of External Assessments. You can find these regulations on this webpage.
- Please ensure you've requested the correct access arrangements for your students on registration in our Portal before the assessment. If you haven’t requested extra time for pupils who require it, please ensure to do this via the Portal no later than 24 hours before the date of the assessment. You can find details of how to do this in our Portal User Guide.
- You should visit the NCFE Portal to confirm your students are booked onto the paper-based assessments and the online assessments as appropriate.
- As a reminder, students must complete both core papers A and B in the same series, with a core exam sub-component result based on the combined outcomes within a series. They can’t split their attempts on each paper across different series, or resit just one of the two core exam papers.
- Please remind your students that if they see claims on social media offering this year’s assessment questions or papers, they should ignore them. These papers will almost certainly be fake, but even accessing fake materials could result in investigation and possible disqualification. Please notify NCFE immediately if you have any concerns about the sharing of questions or assessment papers within your cohort.
Paper-based assessments
If your students are sitting paper-based assessments the papers will arrive by courier:
- You should receive the papers three working days before the date of the assessment. If you are not available for any reason, there will be further delivery attempts each subsequent working day until the day of the assessment if necessary.
- You must store and handle papers securely, in accordance with our Regulations for the Conduct of External Assessments. You can find these regulations on this webpage.
- You should return papers using the yellow label service. Further information can be found on our yellow label webpage.
Online assessments
If your students are sitting assessments online:
- Read the Surpass user guide to understand how it works and watch our instructional video to get a comprehensive understanding of how to navigate Surpass effectively.
- Make sure the learner interface, SecureClient, is installed and tested on your devices well in advance to allow time for testing before the live assessment date. Please note, due to a recent system upgrade, SecureClient will not launch if the desktop version of Grammarly is running on the device. If it is, you will need to close or uninstall Grammarly before launching SecureClient. See our guidance on disabling AI apps.
- You must familiarise yourself with our policies and procedures around the use of tools, particularly ones that use Artificial Intelligence (AI), that could provide pupils with an unfair advantage in online assessments. This could result in investigation, sanctions, and the possible disqualification of students from external assessments. Read the guidance.
- You’ll need a keycode for each student sitting an online assessment. These keycodes will be available from the ‘Invigilate’ screen in Surpass 120 hours (5 days) before the assessment is due to take place.
- You can check whether extra time has been given for any relevant students (where you have requested this using the process outlined in our Portal User Guide) by viewing the duration column in the ‘Invigilate’ screen.
- If the extra time has not been applied, you can do this directly in the ‘Invigilate’ screen, selecting the learner and clicking the ‘modify duration’ button. This must only be applied for eligible students who have had a formal assessment of need completed before the assessment, and this is their usual way of working.
- Please ensure that you’re aware of the start time of the assessment as this must be adhered to (with an allowance to start up to 30 minutes before or after this time, as per our regulations). The ‘Invigilate’ screen in Surpass will show that the assessment can be started between 8am and 4pm. This is not a variation to the set start time, or to allow an assessment to begin at any point in this window; this is to ensure that if you experience technical issues that are not resolved by 10:30am, you can have more time to manage and resolve them. If you’ve been unable to begin an assessment by 10:30am due to technical issues, please contact our T Level Customer Support team via [email protected].
Instructions for centres who have chosen to download the assessment within Surpass (so that students can sit the paper offline within the Surpass software):
- You must upload the students’ assessments to NCFE after the session has finished. If assessments are not uploaded within 24 hours, students may be treated as a ‘did not attend’, potentially impacting results.
- To upload assessments, you must open the SecureClient software on the device used for the assessment, connect to the internet, and the system will automatically upload. This may take up to a few minutes depending on the number of assessments uploading and the speed of your internet connection.
- When the upload is complete, please close the SecureClient software.
- You can check the status of the assessment on the Surpass ‘Invigilate’ screen: if the assessment has been uploaded, you’ll see a green tick to show it’s uploaded.
- If any of your assessments do not upload, please contact our Customer Support team immediately by emailing [email protected].
Further support
If you have any queries relating to T Levels, please contact our Customer Support team at [email protected] or via Live Chat on our website. You can also visit our summer assessment webpage for more information.