Technical Qualifications Webinars

Good afternoon everybody and welcome to the City and Guilds College webinar. I am the Bee Esdaile the City & Guilds Technical Advisor for Land and co-hosting with me will be and Sarah Purdell the Program Development Manager from the National Land Based College.We’re going to talk to you about a few things that we’ve identified as a priority and then we’ll be taking question and answers towards the end. Just to let you know that if we don’t get to your question during the session we will try to retrospectively answer it and we will be recording the webinar for anyone who’s missed it and producing an FAQ afterwards.

The first thing we’re going to talk about today is an update as far as the synoptic assignments are concerned. The synoptic window is now open for all of the Land Technical Qualifications and assessment can start. Just a reminder, all of these controlled assessments must be completed marked and uploaded to the moderation portal by the 18th of May.

You will find guidance as to how to use the portal on the website and details of the moderation portal logins will be supplied to you by the moderation support team in March. Optional units, Employer Involvement, Work Experience, Health and Safety and in the case of Level 3 Animal Management and Level 3 Equine Biology, results must be uploaded by the 15th of June.

Please note, you will be uploading everybody’s marks and everybody’s grades for optional units. You will only be uploading work from your sample, and that sample size will be outlined to you within the marking and moderation guide. The link is actually on this short PowerPoint and you’ll be able to use it once it has been released to you.
All of the moderators have now been allocated their centres and if they’ve not been in touch with you already, they will be getting in contact with you shortly to arrange their visits to you to enable them to observe the practical work that you are undertaking as part of the controlled assessments. If you have any queries with regards to not having heard from a moderator, for example, then please contact the moderation support team with this and they will assist you further.

Exam Update.
The level 2 on-demand exam booking window is now open, therefore you can book for your online opportunity to take these from now. Please note, there are also paper dates for the level 2 exams and these have to be booked as well through the walled garden.

For those of you for level 2 Health and Safety who have elected to do the multiple-choice option, those multiple-choice papers are now available on the website. Centres can of course choose to do the assignment instead or if they wish, they can do both. I think the message here for Centres is that all learners must do a health and safety option for level 2 from which a result can be uploaded.
For those of you that have not finished assessing for access arrangements for exams, these access arrangements must be shared with moderation support by the end of this month. What we would request is that they are summarized on a spreadsheet for all learners when they are submitted and not sent to moderation support in single emails. This way, it should ensure that no learner is missed.

Please can centres also check that where you’ve had learners transfer onto Technicals late, that you have indeed registered those learners for their exams, their optional units and their synoptic assignment. If you have not done so, then please contact Moderation Support who will be able to assist you or Centre Support who will also be able to assist you and again their details are available maps on the latest slide.

The next thing I’d like to draw your attention to are the moderation marking events which have been set up to support you, to help and guide you through gathering evidence for the synoptic assignment and writing supportive narrative to enable you to give the correct marks for the learners.
These are going to be run by the principal moderators for the subject areas concerned. They will give an overview of the synoptic assignment, they will give an explanation of the requirements for evidence submission, they will go through the process of marking synoptic assignments using the documentation and they will also be sharing best practice for you in order for you to carry out your standardization.

Again, on the slide you will see there is a link. This will take you to the place on the website where you can book yourself onto the webinar concerned. Animal management is actually set for tomorrow and there are two time slots available. These webinars, whilst they will be live tomorrow, will be recorded and will go on to the website.
In addition to animal management, there are subject-specific events for equine and agriculture. Whilst the other subject areas do not have subject specific webinars it’s worth pointing out that the whole process of these webinars is to confirm the marking procedure for the controlled assessment and therefore attending or signing into or watching a recording of a webinar afterwards will give excellent guidance as to the process required and will assist standardization even though it is not subject specific. Alongside the land specific webinars you will find other subject specific areas there too.

City & Guilds Team
An addition to our City & Guilds team, from mid-February we will have a second technical adviser operating across the UK. His name is John Wray and he will be assisting myself in offering you support for Technicals, apprenticeship standards and T levels. John comes from a land based delivery background and has a wide breadth of experience which he will be able to use to help him get into the role. He doesn’t know it yet, but he will be attending the next webinar and will introduce himself then. We do know he’s looking forward to getting started.

Contact points and support.
This is really to clarify to you the points to come to when you want specific questions asked and hopefully we’ll make this easier going forward. Any administrative queries relating to the technical qualifications, process queries or access arrangements for example, should be directed to the moderation support team specifically. Their phone number is there (on presentation) as is their email address.

When it comes to queries, with respect to content and delivery, these queries will come to myself (Bee) and to John Wray. Generic queries go to customer services and it’s quite important that you do this so that all queries are logged and therefore we can trace when they have been addressed.

Non-Technical qualifications for example certificates of competence, certificates of technical competence, apprenticeships, work-based diplomas etc, you can also contact custom services or talk to your business manager or your sales executive contact.

On the NLBC website we also have some guidance around a couple of the apprenticeship standards and some training specifications that are located on there as well. As Bee said before, there is a link on the PowerPoint that you’ll be able to click on to go straight to those materials and specifically they are for the Horticulture Standard and the Forestry and Arboriculture Standards. We are hoping to add to that in the future.

As always, we are encouraging teaching staff as well as students to register with NLBC to receive information around the City & Guilds qualifications and any other developments that are going on in the sector, again there is a link on the PowerPoint. For teaching staff if you want to receive the quarterly NLBC newsletter and any other alerts that we’ve put out then there’s also a registration form for that as well.

Something which is incredibly valuable is the City & Guilds email alert and that you can also register for and again there is the link and you can be very specific with that and tailor it to the information that you wish to receive so you kind of set out your parameters and you get all of the information relating to the qualifications that you’re using.

We are looking to hold the next webinar in March. At the moment we’ve got a bit of a blank canvas and we’d really like to put the question out there to everyone attending this webinar and those colleagues who couldn’t make it as well, just to let us know what you would like to be included and any topics that you wish to have covered. You can use the registration form and we can contact you that way or you can drop either myself or Bee an email or a telephone call if you want to talk to us about anything that you’d like to see the next webinar.

What we would like to do now is ask if you have any questions that you type them in. There is actually representation here from our Qualification Assessment and Development Team as well as myself and we will take any questions that you have and either give our answers verbally if we were able to or refer them if not. This will all be recorded within a transcript and will be sent out to you by email.

What we will do is will mute ourselves for the next five minutes to allow people time to have a think about any questions that they may have. If nothing comes up, then we will just send the PowerPoint out anyway in order that you have it to refer to, such that you can also use the links you.