FAB Supports VQ Day
Awarding Bodies & Centres
The Awarding Bodies and Centres special interest group focuses on improving relationships between awarding bodies and centres. This group is chaired by Nigel Florence from ABC Awards and meets quarterly, with additional meetings held as required. Minutes from this group are available on the members' section of the website.
Awarding bodies are accountable to Ofqual for the quality and rigour of their assessment arrangements and have to operate certain quality assurance systems in order to comply with the regulator’s requirements.
Awarding bodies are reliant on fees for their qualifications. This means that they are customer focused and responsive to their customers’ demands. Learning providers and individuals are encouraged to exercise choice in the market to ensure they receive the levels of service, including the streamlined administration that they have a right to expect.
Responsiveness to customers, flexibility and innovation can result in diverse awarding body arrangements for centres. The Federation provides a forum in which awarding bodies can work together to identify user concerns and seek to strike an acceptable balance between coherence and flexibility.
Somewhat ironically, awarding bodies experience pressures from a variety of initiatives which, while aimed at reducing bureaucracy, do not always seem to be well co-ordinated and therefore have the effect of increasing the bureaucratic burden. The Federation is working to raise concerns of this kind with the government departments and agencies involved.
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