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Transcript - 'Ofqual Explains: An overview of our rules and guidance'

Published 10 December 2018

Applies to England

Welcome to the first episode of Ofqual Explains, a new series of videos designed to help you understand Ofqual’s regulatory framework – our rules and guidance for the awarding organisations we regulate.

In this episode, I’m going to talk about the different rules we set and guidance we publish. By the end of the video we hope you’ll have a good understanding of how they all fit together, who they apply to, and where to find them.

Legislation - the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 – requires us to publish rules and guidance for the awarding organisations we regulate.

You have to follow our rules, and we can take regulatory action, including enforcement, if you don’t.

Our guidance is designed to help you understand how to comply with our rules. You must have regard to our guidance; this means you can choose to take a different approach, but need to be able to explain why.

We have a legal duty to consult before publishing, or changing, any of our rules and guidance. Consultation responses help us understand the likely impact of our proposals, and inform our final decision about whether to publish or change our rules and guidance.

This diagram shows how all our rules and guidance fit together. As you can see, we’ve organised them into three sections – with the rules and guidance getting more specific, and more detailed, as you move from top to bottom.  

The top section represents general rules and guidance, which normally apply to all Ofqual-regulated qualifications.

Our rules are set out in what we call our General Conditions of Recognition.

We also have some more detailed rules we call requirements, which build on, and should be read alongside, the General Conditions. These cover;

• information on certificates
• use of Ofqual’s Logo
• assigning levels to qualifications and their Components, and
• assigning Guided Learning and Total Qualification Time (TQT)

We have guidance which supports these rules, and is designed to help you understand how to comply with them. Most of this guidance relates to specific General Conditions of Recognition, but we also have some thematic guidance (for example, our guidance on qualification levels and our level descriptors).

All of these general rules and guidance are collected together in a single online resource we call the Ofqual Handbook, which you can find on our website.

Some qualifications have extra rules and guidance that apply in addition to our general ones. These are represented by the middle and bottom sections of the diagram.

The reason there are two sections is that some are what we call qualification-level rules and guidance (which apply to all qualifications of a particular type – for example all Project qualifications). Others are subject-level rules and guidance (which apply to all qualifications of a particular type in a particular subject – for example all Functional Skills qualifications in English, or all 9 to1 GCSEs in French).

The following qualifications have extra rules;

• GCSEs, A levels and AS levels
• project qualifications
• advanced extension awards (AEAs)
• functional skills qualifications
• English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) qualifications; and
• Ofqual-regulated apprenticeship end-point assessments

We set extra rules like these where we need, or want, to take a different approach for a particular qualification. That might be because we need to set additional, more detailed, expectations for a qualification – for example when we specify particular content that the qualification must cover.

But we also sometimes use qualification- or subject-level rules to change the way a more general rule applies to a specific qualification. One example of this is in GCSEs, and A levels, where, for those specific qualifications, we have replaced our general rules for appeals with a bespoke approach.

You’ll remember I said earlier that our general rules usually apply to all regulated qualifications. This is the only situation where they don’t – where a more specific rule modifies or replaces a general rule.

To find out more about these extra rules, please watch our video on Qualification-level and subject-level rules.

To recap:

• our regulatory framework has three layers: General rules, Qualification Level rules and Subject Level rules
• awarding organisations must comply with our rules, and have regard to our guidance
• we can take action where awarding organisations break our rules
• we consult before publishing new, or changing existing, rules and guidance
• qualification- and subject-level rules should be taken into account in addition to the general rules, and in some cases they modify or replace a general rule.

In addition to our General Conditions of Recognition, we also set requirements around certificate and logo requirements, qualification and component levels and Total Qualification Time

You can find all of our rules and guidance on our website, simply click on ‘understand our rules’.