How do you plan your apprenticeship standards programmes? How do you review the quality of these programmes? How can you demonstrate that the learners are benefiting from your delivery? We have developed Stedfast to allow organisations delivering apprenticeships to plan, manage and review their programmes. Using the published outcomes from apprenticeship standards, users are able to identify performance measures and then review progress against these. Where measures have not been achieved, users are able to action plan improvements.
Creating Apprenticeship Standards Programme Reviews
All apprenticeships standards have skills, knowledge and behaviours. A full list of apprenticeship standards can be found on the Institute for Apprenticeships website.
When the system administrator creates an outcomes assessment plan they will need to create the normal review cycles. We recommend that at least three cycles are created as this allows users to see development over a set period.
The administrator will also need to set up the plan grading – up to five grades can be added to any assessment template. The grades will be added to the measures with the default grades. We have designed Stedfast in a way that allows the administrators to add descriptions to the grades. This helps review staff grade their submissions against specific criteria. We have found that this is particularly useful when conducting reviews against frameworks such as the OfSTED Inspection Framework.
Once the administrator has created the review cycles, they or the assessment plan owner can now add the apprenticeship standards outcomes. This can be done by either importing the standards from a central repository or can be added manually by the organisation.
Adding Assessment Plan Measures
Stedfast is a powerful planning and quality assurance tool. The key purpose of the apprenticeship standards outcomes assessment plan is that it allows each of the skills, knowledge and behaviours outcomes to have one or more measures that will then be reviewed. As measure allows the users to set how they expect the performance to be validated.
All of the outcomes need to have a measure and are allocated to members of the assessment plan team. This allows the team members to review each measure that has been assigned to them.
Once the measure has been reviewed, users are able to identify actions that are then added to the action plan.
What is the purpose of the review?
Reviews have two purposes. The first is to support the planning of an apprenticeship programme. How you deliver to each outcome (skills, knowledge and behaviour) is clearly stated with a measure in place to track performance. The second purpose is to actually add your findings against the measure, identify strengths and areas for improvement and to action plan the quality of delivery. For any organisation that is subject to an OfSTED inspection, this becomes a hugely beneficial exercise as it allows you to demonstrate your planning of delivery and how you manage and maintain performance.
