Professional bodies play an important and complimentary role to our own regulatory role within education quality assurance and enhancement.
Professional body expectations and regulatory requirements
Many professional bodies accredit or approve education programmes against their own criteria. Often, professional bodies set expectations for areas like entry requirements to programmes, programme design and delivery (including curriculum guidance), resourcing arrangements including staff / learner ratios, and the duration and range of practice-based learning.
Our standards of education and training (SETs) are flexible and outcome focused, to ensure those who complete programmes meet our requirements for registration (namely our profession specific standards of proficiency, and our cross professional standards of conduct, performance, and ethics).
Where we do not define specific requirements for areas like staff / learner ratios or the number and range of practice-based learning, we do assess education provider approaches in these areas when approving and monitoring programmes, linked to our standards.
Understanding professional body expectations helps us set context, to understand what normal looks like, and ask the right questions of education providers, when making our judgements.
It is possible for programmes to not meet professional body expectations but to be approved by us. In these cases, we fully explore education provider approaches, understanding context and professional body expectations, and make an independent judgement that our standards are met based on the approach of the education provider and the outcome-focused nature of our standards.
Strategic education engagement with professional bodies
We also work with professional bodies to understand their current areas of interest, concerns, and initiatives they are undertaking in relation to the education and training of the professions we regulate.
We chair an education-focused forum meeting with professional bodies, to share information to support and assure high quality education and training in our professions. We also hold regular 1-2-1 meetings with each professional body, and have named contacts at professional bodies and the HCPC to build trusted relationships and enable good engagement.
This all enables us to influence our processes and assessments, for example by defining the questions we ask education providers through our regular performance review monitoring exercise, and when setting context for our assessments.
If professional bodies have made changes to their advice or guidance, we would expect a high performing education provider to have considered these changes. Whether education providers have considered changes, and what they have done as a result of them, informs our view of risk for each education provider.
Working together through programme level assessments
Our quality assurance model is flexible by design. This means that we design our assessment activities depending on the areas we need to explore. We aim to dovetail our assessments with professional bodies where this is helpful for education provider, professional bodies, and us.
When education providers seek HCPC approval and professional body endorsement / accreditation at the same time, we can apply the flexibility of our model to help assist this. However, as we no longer centre our quality assurance activities around a physical or virtual ‘visit’, we may not run joint activities (such as meetings or visits) with professional bodies as part of our assessment activities.
We now aim to be more purposeful with professional bodies through our assessments, to ensure we are consistent with our engagement, rather than overlapping if the education provider arranges this.
Where the professional body would like us to, we have established information sharing arrangements, which enable us to share detailed information to help professional bodies understand and influence our assessments (and vice versa).
We formally consider intelligence provided by professional bodies as part of our activities and within our decision making. This gives us a clearer picture of the quality of education provision and alignment with our standards.
