Developing new national qualifications

In the summer or 2020, we were engaged by one of the nation’s leading qualification awarding organisations to support the development of six new T Level qualifications, and to prepare our client and their customers for delivery of the new, very different, products.

To successfully deliver the programme we:

• Engaged with senior leaders and working-level colleagues in our client’s organisation, and in the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE), to rapidly establish the current status of the development effort including the issues and risks it faced.
• Mobilised a best practice programme and risk management environment, including through the development of a detailed plan spanning all aspects of product development, stakeholder consultation, customer engagement and support, operational and tech transformation.
• Provided expert, technical, support to our client’s product development team to help them accelerate work to build the new T Level qualifications, assessment strategies, and supporting documents required by IfATE and Ofqual.
• Led programme, and technical-level, engagement with IfATE and Ofqual throughout the remainder of the development process – ensuring that they were content with our approach, their touchpoints with the work, and, crucially, with the products we were building.
• Designed and oversaw an expansive stakeholder, practitioner and customer engagement effort – through which we secured valuable input from more than 700 colleagues, which helped us ensure that the products intimately reflected labour market realities.
• Designed and led a wide-ranging programme of engagement with and support for schools, colleges and training providers that would begin to deliver the new qualifications – ensuring they understood what would be required of them, and how they could best teach them.
• Mobilised and led delivery of a substantial, complex, operational readiness effort through which we adapted and evolved our client’s operating model, processes, and tech to facilitate timely, compliant, and customer-centric delivery of these new products.

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Within seven months of our engagement, Government had approved the new qualifications for delivery – and strongly commended the work we had done to drive the programme.  Of our work, our client CEO said:

“[Avencera]’s contribution was exceptional.  They provided us with strong, insightful, and immediately impactful programme leadership and management support – enabling us to drive rapid progress on all aspects of what is a huge, complex piece of work.  

The way in which they embedded themselves in and worked alongside our team was rare to see in a consulting engagement – and enabled them to add huge value to our wider transformation and the professional development of our people.”