Leading complex operational delivery during Covid

We were engaged by one the UK’s largest qualification awarding organisations to lead all aspects of their operational and customer response to Covid through the second of two academic cycles that were materially disrupted by the pandemic.

To support safe, compliant, delivery of the awarding cycle, we embedded a multi-disciplinary expert team in our client’s organisation.  Working alongside client colleagues, we:

• Rapidly mobilised a best practice programme and risk management office (PMO) to act as a single, central, hub providing governance, leadership, and surge capacity to colleagues working in all parts of our client’s organisation.
• Prepared a comprehensive plan, capturing all of the activity across our client’s organisation that would contribute to successful delivery of an awarding cycle that we could be certain would need to adjust and adapt several times throughout the year.
• Systematically monitored the implications and impacts of the pandemic for our client and their customers - rapidly translating changes in overall Government policy and social restrictions into operational policy, processes, and customer communications / service.
• Oversaw the review of more than 700 qualifications in our client’s portfolio – adapting their content, assessment, and compliance requirements in a manner which met Government’s evolving requirements, our client’s internal and regulatory obligations.
• Oversaw the design and implementation of our client’s use of so-called ‘teacher assessed grades’ - including the definition of evidence requirements, specification and operation of enhanced quality assurance processes, and appeals mechanism.
• Conducted substantial, sophisticated, data analysis, and built recurrent reports, so that we could accurately forecast certification volumes, and manage the year’s students as a cohort such that we could be confident that all students who expected a grade, got one.
• Led the rapid design, piloting, launch and operation of a ‘remote invigilation’ solution which enabled more than 5,000 students to sit assessments anytime, anywhere, whilst their access to their education institutions was constrained during the academic year.
• Led design and delivery of a huge customer communications, engagement and support effort to ensure that education institutions, students and their families understood how the adapted awarding cycle would work – and what it meant for them.

Through the programme, we successfully awarded >500k qualifications, including >50k through use of teacher assessed grades.  The customer contact operation we oversaw secured a NPS of +78 during results weeks in August, up 56 on the previous year.  87% of our client’s customers fed back that they felt ‘supported’ or ‘very supported’ through the pandemic.

Of our work, our client’s CEO said: “[Avencera]’s ability to translate the external environment into a precise, robust programme of operational work is incredible – as is their ability to engage with and understand Government.”