A high-quality technical education system is one that aligns to the skills needs of employers. Our occupational standards set out the knowledge, skills and behaviours an individual needs to be competent within a skilled occupation at different levels. The powers granted by the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 enable IfATE to reshape the technical education landscape by requiring a much greater range of technical qualifications to be aligned to the occupational standards set by employers. This is a major reform, putting employers at the heart of technical qualifications.
Our 15 route panels represent the employer voice within IfATE. Panel members are experts in their industry, characterised by their breadth of occupational knowledge, experience and understanding of the current and future skills needs of their sectors. To date, they have played essential roles in the approval of apprenticeships, T Level technical qualifications and, more recently, Higher Technical Qualifications. We value the expertise of our route panels, and their endorsement of technical qualifications will enhance the confidence of both students choosing qualifications to study and employers using them in their recruitment processes.
Through our consultation, we lay out how we will manage the approval of high-quality technical qualifications, focusing on alignment with our employer-led occupational standards. We want to hear employers’ views on our proposals to approve the next generation of technical qualifications, particularly on the way employers’ input and strategic guidance will help to shape these qualifications.
We appreciate employers may only wish to engage with questions most pertinent to them. If this applies to you, please find a link to six selected employer-focused questions which accompanies this guide.
In the full consultation document, we are also consulting on the technicalities of the approval criteria with most questions likely to be more relevant to awarding bodies (who develop the qualifications). The full consultation is accompanied by a guide for awarding bodies which provides additional technical information relating to criteria and the process of seeking approval.
A truly integrated skills system brings employers into the heart of product design, ensuring that employers’ skill needs, across occupations, can be fully understood and met. We share DfE’s ambition that, in future, the qualifications landscape should be streamlined, offering clear career progression opportunities and giving confidence that qualifications are high quality.
A fundamental part of this will be our employer-led occupational standards, alignment to which ensures that students are gaining the knowledge, skills and behaviours employers tell us are needed to be competent in an occupation. The occupational standards are presented in our occupational maps; these underpin our work, setting out the occupations that can be accessed through technical education.
Occupational standards already inform the content of apprenticeships and technical qualifications including (level 3) T Levels and (levels 4 & 5) Higher Technical Qualifications. These reforms mean that employer-set occupational standards will now play a similarly important role for technical qualifications that run alongside T levels at level 3, as well as those supporting entry to lower-level roles at level 2. This will bring consistency between the products, as the basis for the content of both technical qualifications and apprenticeships will be the same occupational standard.
Questions 1-2
Introductory questions about you
Question 3
What current barriers do employers face when looking to utilise technical qualifications for workforce development and/or recruitment?
Open response
We plan to provide employer-led strategic guidance in each route (for example, construction and the built environment), alongside occupational standards, to inform which qualifications should be made available. This strategic guidance will enhance awarding bodies’ understanding of how the employers we work with see the current qualifications system at a more holistic level and inform them of emerging issues and potential future demands within the system.
To produce this, we will combine route panels’ views with a range of data we hold for technical qualifications in each route. This will include data being produced by the recently launched Unit for Future Skills as well as broader route-level technical education data produced by IfATE and DfE.
Question 4
We plan to provide guidance to awarding bodies to help them with the shaping of their development priorities/approaches. This guidance would be developed by employers. Do you agree that this would be helpful?
(drop down list/tick box) Yes, No, N/A. Please provide an explanation for your response.
Our approval process is designed to ensure that technical qualifications are delivering the knowledge, skills and behaviours which are demanded by industry. To achieve this, IfATE will implement a robust process designed to test the content and assessment developed by awarding bodies against the needs of employers.
We will ensure that the qualifications we approve prepare students to demonstrate competence within their chosen occupational area. Primarily we will do this by assessing a qualification’s coverage of our employer-led occupational standards. Our assessment criteria will ensure qualifications assess content in a suitable way, giving confidence to employers that a student is truly ready to practice within an occupation or role. Ofqual will continue regulation of all technical qualifications to further safeguard quality.
The new ‘employer demand’ test underpins all our criteria, ensuring that employers have been involved in the development and validation of qualifications which we approve. For all qualifications we approve at level 3 and below, a successful application will have been required to provide us an evidence pack which assures us:
Question 5
Do you agree that the evidence requested is sufficient to assure IfATE of employer demand for submitted qualifications?
(drop down list/tick box) Yes, No, N/A. If yes/no, please provide an explanation for your response.
Clarity of choice is one of the essential hallmarks of a clear, high-quality, technical education system. Clear qualification titling and materials (for example, qualification specification, certificate of achievement etc.) will enable employers to assess the quality and relevance of a particular qualification and, ultimately, the likely competence of a student who has achieved a technical qualification.
We believe there are two essential titling conventions which will assist employers in understanding the utility of a technical qualification.
We intend to mandate these within the titling of all technical qualifications. An example of what a future technical qualification title may look like is:
In the example provided, the title references the awarding body name, qualification level, type of competence, job role and link to the occupational standards.
The second requirement we are exploring, and would value your input on, is the use of the IfATE brand to signal quality in the technical education space. Due to the rigour and employer focus of our approval process, we expect that, in time, IfATE approval will become a reliable and trusted signal of quality for technical qualifications. We are therefore interested in views on the importance of signalling this approval through the titling of qualifications.
Question 6
Do you agree with IfATE’s proposed requirements relating to the accurate description of content in qualification titles?
(drop down list/tick box) Yes, No, N/A. If yes/no, please provide an explanation for your response.
Question 7
Would it be helpful to employers if the title of a qualification included confirmation of employer endorsement following approval by IfATE?
(drop down list/tick box) Yes, No, N/A. If yes, please provide an explanation for your response.
The following is a duplication of the information published in annex A of our technical consultation:
Employers have played a central role in developing the occupational standards against which technical qualifications must map. IfATE approval of technical qualifications will provide employers with a clear, recognisable, and high-quality qualifications market. The employer demand test will allow IfATE to use employer evidence provided by awarding bodies to assess whether a qualification is genuinely needed by employers. This will result in awarding bodies relying on the input of employers to a greater extent than has previously been the case. The rigorousness of IfATE’s proposed approval process will give employers confidence in the knowledge, skills and behaviours students will possess upon completion of technical qualifications. It will ensure that employers are able to access the skilled workforce essential to growing the economy.
We are alert to the increasing demands we may place on employers – especially our member employers, such as our route panel members – as we seek to engage them in relation to even more technical education products. We are reviewing our approaches to employer engagement and will continue to work with our employers to ensure we are able to maximise the expertise they bring to us without being over-burdened by our expansion of responsibility.
Question 8
With reference to the impact assessment published in Annex A, are there any additional steps that could be taken to mitigate any negative impact, resulting from the proposed approach to approvals?
(drop down list/tick box) Yes, No. If yes, please provide examples, data and/or evidence where possible.
Thank you for taking the time to engage with our consultation. We are confident that, with the input of employers, we can build a truly integrated skills system with high-quality technical qualifications playing a central role in increasing skills and productivity in the economy.