International | FAQs | NCFE

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International FAQs

Please use the categories below to find the relevant answer to your question.

You can find the full list of NCFE's international centres and locations here.

  1. Customised qualifications – these are qualifications written by you and accredited by us, and are unregulated. This means that they’re not regulated by Ofqual and are not part of a qualification framework. To enquire about this service, please complete the customised qualifications enquiry form.
  2. Regulated qualifications – these are qualifications written by us and regulated by Ofqual, using the Regulated Qualifications Framework (RQF). To speak to us about our regulated qualifications, please complete the regulated qualifications form.  

At NCFE, we’re committed to the highest standards of quality assurance and ensuring that learners and centres across the world receive the same quality of service. Our international delivery requirements for UK centres, outline NCFE’s conditions for delivery of qualifications offering external assessment, competency elements and qualifications with knowledge-only elements to learners outside of the UK.   

At present, we do not permit delivery of any qualifications with external assessment to international centres, with the exception of online Functional Skills assessments. For UK centres wishing to offer qualifications to international learners that have competency elements or face-to-face assessment and delivery, it’s important to note that we have strict requirements in relation to centre approval. We require an in-country centre to be established, and any requests must be business cased and discussed with our International team, in the first instance. This is to decide if we can support an application. 

For centres wishing to offer knowledge-only qualifications via distance learning, you’re permitted to deliver qualifications to learners across the world. However, we do need to understand the delivery model and include cohorts/learners into our external quality assurance (EQA) sampling plans at EQA review time. Please speak to your External Quality Assurer for further information.  

We take our international delivery seriously and we believe these requirements will ensure the highest quality education and assessment for all learners.  

International fees and pricing are available on request. Please email [email protected] for further information. 

  1. Gather your approval documents. Please refer to the below checklist for documents that you will need to submit in order for us to carry out your approval review. 
  2. Pay the international application fee. This can be made by international bank transfer or by calling our Finance team on +44 01912398000. 
  3. Send your approval documents to [email protected]  
Your approval review:

Once we receive your form, documents and payment, we’ll assign a member of our External Quality Assurance team to do your review. We’ll be making sure that you have appropriate management systems, policies, administrative arrangements, resources, staff, assessment and internal quality assurance structures in place to be able to deliver our qualifications.   

Please ensure that you refer carefully to our approval criteria and gather evidence which supports each of the individual criteria before your approval review. The approval criteria document will form the structure of your approval review and you’ll need to prepare in advance for the review to take place. 

Staffing:

We’ll arrange mandatory training to help your assessors, tutors and internal quality assurance staff to familiarise themselves with our expectations and our quality assurance policies. Your staff will need to be occupationally knowledgeable and competent to be able to assess; this means they’ll have to have, or be working towards, a relevant degree/teaching qualification or a UK assessor qualification and have direct work experience. This needs to be listed in the CVs you submit with your application.  These are some of the qualifications your staff should have to enable them to take on the role of Assessor or Internal Quality Assurer:  

  • D32/33/34 
  • A1, V1 
  • AAQA L3, L4 
  • A teaching degree 
  • Occupational competence for Assessors 
  • Knowledge competence of internal quality assurance. 

There are also some NCFE qualifications which can only be delivered by staff who are occupationally competent in their field. These are outlined in the qualification specification for each qualification on our website.   

Documents checklist

To be approved, you’ll need to submit the following documents:  

  • Complaints procedure 
  • Conflict of interest policy and procedure  
  • CVs/resumes for relevant staff  
  • Diversity and equal opportunities policy  
  • Health and safety policy 
  • Internal quality assurance strategy and process  
  • Learner appeals procedure  
  • Learner induction procedure  
  • Malpractice and plagiarism policy and procedure  
  • Proof of payment of application fee. 

International certificates should be claimed on the tenth of each month. We’ll issue the certificates before the fifteenth of each month. 

Sample certificates can be viewed here.