We recognise the financial pressures faced by the higher education sector, and that this has led, or may lead, to difficult decisions about staffing at education providers.
With this in mind, we are setting out our regulatory requirements linked to staffing, and our regulatory approach to considering changes.
We appreciate that this is a difficult time for education providers as organisations, and for the members of staff within education providers themselves. We do not want to add additional burden by setting complex regulatory requirements. Our intention is to provide clear and helpful information that influences your considerations in this area.
Our requirements
Our primary function is to protect the public. For education and training, we do this by holding education providers to our standards of education and training (SETs). Our SETs are outcome focused, to ensure those who complete programmes meet our requirements for registration. We therefore do not set specific ‘inputs’ required for staffing, such as staff / learner ratios, or specific qualifications that staff must hold. This means that education providers can resource their programmes in a variety of ways, as long as staff are able to deliver an effective programme.
SET 3.9 specifically links to this area – “There must be an adequate number of appropriately qualified and experienced staff in place to deliver an effective programme.”
This means that there must be enough people, with the right qualifications and experience, to make sure the programme is effective in its delivery of individuals who meet our requirements for registration. We leave you to define the number of staff, and the qualifications / experience that staff need, to deliver your model of learning, then we assess whether we are satisfied with the arrangements.
Expectations of other organisations
We recognise that other organisations, such as professional bodies, will often define a certain staff / learner ratio through their own expectations. We are aware of these expectations when we assess programmes, but do not hold education providers to them. Instead, we ask you to consider professional body expectations as part of your thinking, and provide your own reasoning as to why the staffing model meets our expectations (whether that staffing model is in line with professional body expectations or otherwise).
What you should do
If you are planning changes to staffing models, you should include our staffing SETs and professional body expectations as part of your considerations.
If you do make changes to your staffing model, you do not need to do anything proactive with us. This is in line with our approach to change – we are confident that education providers are properly organised to deliver education and training programmes, and we do not need to sign off on changes as they happen. We will ask questions linked to this area through your next engagement with our regular performance review monitoring assessment.
Support from HCPC
We are here to help – if you would like to discuss your considerations, or how to interpret our standards, we are happy to have an informal conversation with you. Your nominated quality assurance contact should get in touch with the HCPC regional lead to start any conversations.