Guidance

VTQ AO-centre relationships: guide to the data submission process

Published 3 July 2025

Applies to England, Northern Ireland and Wales

Introduction

In order to fulfil our regulatory and accreditation functions as set out in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009, we require awarding organisations to provide the following data for regulated qualifications.

What data will be collected?

Data should relate to information on Centres that awarding organisations have relationships with.

For End Point Assessments, this would also include all Centres that are administering any aspect of the assessment. Please see this guidance for more information on what classes as a Centre for EPAs.

If you do not use any Centres in the delivery of your qualifications we would expect a nil return.

Qualifications in scope

The following qualification types are in scope of this collection:

• core maths
• English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) skills for life qualifications
• Functional Skills qualifications (FSQs)
• academic, vocational technical qualifications (VTQs) that are included in the Department for Education’s performance tables (PTQs) for the academic year being submitted
• technical awards
• technical certificates
• tech levels
• applied generals
• academic (excluding GCSE, AS, A level, T level, AEA and project level 3)
• all other vocational and technical qualifications
• other general qualifications
• end-point assessments

Countries in scope

Data should be included for all centres in:

• England
• Northern Ireland
• Wales
• other UK regions
• non-UK

Time period in scope

Data for the previous, full academic year (1 September to 31 August).

Centres should be included if they have been approved to deliver any of the in-scope qualifications listed above by the AO at any point within that timeframe. This would include any centres from previous academic years that are still currently approved, centres which were approved for the first time during the academic year, and centres that had approval at some point in the academic year but may no longer be approved currently.

 Any centre where approval starts at the beginning of the current academic year (1 September) should also be included.

When data will be collected

Data will be collected according to the reporting schedule which is updated regularly.

How to submit your data

Your data must be submitted to us in CSV format. Please refer to the Connecting to Ofqual’s data portal and uploading data document for more information. If you need to ask us about a data submission Data.Services@ofqual.gov.uk.

Please do not send your data files via email or via Contact the Regulator in the Portal.

Uploaded data

Once files have been successfully uploaded, the data will be validated against a set of validation rules.

If validation is successful, the data is automatically transferred into Ofqual’s internal systems and you will receive email confirmation. If the file is unsuccessful at any stage of validation you will receive an email with details of the validation failure. Please correct your file and resubmit it.

The specific validation rules which are in place for this template are detailed in the ‘validation rules’ section below.

Amendments to data

Errors or omissions in the data

Once the data has been successfully uploaded, it will be checked by Ofqual staff. If an error or omission is spotted, the data may be queried, and you may be requested to resubmit it. We will need to reject your existing submission ahead of a resubmission.

If you find an error or omission after you’ve had a successful upload, Data.Services@ofqual.gov.uk. We need to reject the existing submission before you can upload a new file.

If you wish to see your latest submission of a data return, for example to check the submission if it has been queried, please know it is available to download in the data portal.

Scheduled revisions of data

Each submission of this data is intended to show a snapshot in time. Therefore, there will be no resubmissions required to reflect any further updates to the data already submitted, unless an error or omission is spotted.

How your data will be used

This data will be used to undertake our regulatory activities and to fulfil our responsibility as a government department.

General completion guidelines

Numeric values must not have any formatting.

To allow us to identify the centre please provide at least one of CentreNCN, CentreURN, UKPRN or CentreIdentifierOther. If more than one is collected, please provide as many as are available.

Data should be presented as 1 row per qualification per centre. This means that multiple rows may be needed for each centre (depending on the number of qualifications they are recognised to offer).

When reporting CurrentCentreStatus please provide the current status of the centre as of the start of the current academic year (1 September).

File format

The file must be CSV format and the first row must be headers as displayed in the ‘Name’ column of the table below. The subsequent rows must have the values of the data to be reported which must match the format and validation rules below.

Name	Description	Position	Description of Regular Expression	Validation Regular Expression
ReportingDate	Date the file was due to be submitted to Ofqual regardless of when it was actually uploaded (this date will be made available by Ofqual)	1	The date in the following format: year (4 digits), a dash, month (2 digits), a dash, day (2 digits)	^(20)\d\d[-](0[1-9]|1[012])[-](0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])$
AwardingOrganisation	Name of the awarding organisation	2	1 to 100 characters accepted	^.{1,100}$
CentreName	Name of centre or trading name	3	1 to 150 characters accepted. -2 accepted for unknown	^.{1,150}$
Address	Address of Centre (excluding postcode)	4	1 to 150 characters accepted. -2 accepted for unknown	^.{1,150}$
Postcode	Postcode of centre	5	1 to 10 characters accepted. -2 accepted for unknown	^.{1,10}$
Country	Name of country. For names of Non-UK countries, please use the FCDO geographical all names index Please provide the region name (Scotland, Isle of Man, or Channel Islands) for Other UK regions	6	1 to 50 characters accepted. -2 accepted for unknown	^.{1,50}$
CentreURN	Centre’s Unique Reference Number as assigned by the Department for Education at the time of data submission	7	Valid Centre URN. Up to 6-digit integer accepted. -2 also accepted where centre does not have a URN or if URN is unknown	^\d{1,6}$
CentreNCN	Centre’s National Centre Number as allocated by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) at the time of data submission	8	Valid NCN code. Up to 5-digit integer accepted. -2 also accepted where centre does not have a NCN or if NCN is unknown	^\d{1,5}$
UKPRN	Centre ID – UK Provider Reference Number	9	A numeric value between 10000000 and 99999999. -2 accepted for unknown	^.{10000000,99999999}$
CentreIdentifierOther	Any other unique number allocated to the centre or assessment venue by individual awarding organisations at the time of data submission, Must be provided if neither CentreURN, CentreNCN or UKPRN areavailable	10	1 to 15 characters accepted. -2 permitted where at least one of NCN, URN or UKPRN have been provided	^.{1,15}$
CentreApprovalDate	Date of when centre had been first approved by the awarding organisation	11	The date in the following format: year (4 digits), a dash, month (2 digits), a dash, day (2 digits). -2 accepted for unknown	^(20)\d\d[-](0[1-9]|1[012])[-](0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])$
CurrentCentreStatus	Current status of centre (as of the start of the current academic year (1 September))	12	Accepted values: Approved No longer approved	^(Approved|No longer approved)$
QualificationNumber	This should be the unique identifier for the qualification offered as it appears in Ofqual’s Register of Regulated qualifications, for example, 123/1234/1	13	Valid Qualification Number. 1 to 10 characters accepted	^.{1,10}$

Validation rules

A data submission is only considered complete once it has successfully passed the validation rules.

If the file is unsuccessful at any stage of validation you will receive an email with details of the validation failure. Please correct your file and resubmit it. A file may be successful but with warnings. Warnings will not cause failure in the validation process but will highlight entries which may need to be checked. You will receive an email with details of the warning in an attached “Data Validation Warnings Report”. If you receive this, please review the report and contact Data.Services@ofqual.gov.uk should the data require any amendment.

The validation rules for this template check that each field is correctly formatted. The correct formatting of the fields are detailed in the ‘file format’ section. Failure to format the fields in line with the validation regular expression will result in unsuccessful validation.

Additional validation rules are also in place for this template and may include cross-referencing with other templates. These validation rules along with whether they result in failure or a warning are detailed in the following table.

Validation rule	Result if not met
Reporting date matches with the collection date	Fail and rejected

Contacts

For all queries or feedback relating to the data collection process, amendments to data previously provided, or for general guidance, please contact:

Data services

Ofqual
2nd floor, 1 Friargate
Station Square
Coventry
CV1 2GN

Email Data.Services@ofqual.gov.uk