Our quality assurance approach means we use data and intelligence to inform how we undertake assessments.
A great example of this is some work we recently carried out with Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW).
HEIW commissioned new healthcare educational provision in the country, to start in September 2022. HEIW intend to:
- Increase their local and regional provision and provide a benefit for graduates to progress into roles in Wales
- Place emphasis on recruiting learners from disadvantaged and hard to reach areas of Wales and from hard-to-reach communities through financial incentives
- Increase opportunities for practice-based learning in primary, social and community care
- Embed technologies and the digital environment to enhance learning and teaching, student support and placement preparation
- Provide an enhanced approach to interprofessional education and more flexible and part-time routes across many professions and more parts of Wales
- Provide closer regional collaborative education working arrangements, and to integrate compassionate leadership in all pre-registration education.
We worked with HEIW to understand their approach within the commissioning exercise, and how we could support each other to achieve proportionate assessments against our education standards to take assurance.
Scrutiny of the HEIW tender provided us with assurance that successful education providers would meet some of our specific standards, or parts of standards, without the need for us to see full evidence linked to these areas.
Many areas assessed by HEIW through the tender process had considerable overlap with our standards. We decided to use prior assessment by HEIW to apply a ‘right touch’ approach to assessment, gaining assurance the education providers and programmes had already been assessed, or at least demonstrated some progress, in certain areas of our standards of education and training (SETs).
Each new programme proposal went through a bespoke approval process with the assurances taken by HEIW in mind. This was aimed to reduce the education provider’s workload, to move us towards our aim of providing more effective and proportionate risk-based decision-making.
The new programmes have all been approved to start this month. The programmes went through our approval process without us needing to set conditions across all five providers, which is an excellent result across the providers. This type of close collaboration is something we want to do more of, so all parties can create an environment to share ideas and celebrate improvements.