OVERVIEW
Internal quality assurance (IQA) exists to give everyone — learners, employers, awarding organisations and the wider public — confidence that assessment decisions are safe, fair and consistent. The internal quality assurer is the person who checks the assessors: sampling their evidence, monitoring their practice, and confirming that the qualifications and outcomes they award genuinely reflect what learners can do. But a question sits just behind that reassuring picture, and it is the question this course is built around: who checks the checkers? Where a centre has more than one IQA, or operates across several sites or centres, the IQAs themselves must apply the standards consistently — otherwise the very safeguard that IQA is supposed to provide starts to leak. This course is deliberately distinct from a standardisation course aimed at assessors. It is not primarily about getting a team of assessors to mark the same way, although that is part of the picture and remains an IQA responsibility. Instead it is about standardising IQA practice itself: helping a team of internal quality assurers reach a shared understanding of the standards and, just as importantly, a shared understanding of how to make sampling, monitoring and decision judgements consistently. It also covers moderation — the work of aligning IQA and assessment decisions across different IQAs and different centres, both internally and through the external quality assurance (EQA) carried out by the awarding organisation. You will learn why IQA practice drifts when it is left unstandardised, what the shared standards are that every IQA must apply the same way, and how to run practical standardisation activities such as double or blind sampling of the same evidence by different IQAs. You will look at how to compare IQA reports and feedback for consistency, how to benchmark against exemplars, how to moderate decisions across sites and centres, how the EQA checks that your IQAs are aligned, and how to keep the records and audit trail that prove your quality system works. The course closes with a 20-question multiple-choice assessment, which you must pass at 80% to earn your CPD certificate.
This is an awareness-level CPD course. It develops your understanding and does not confer assessor or quality-assurer status; it is not a TAQA or CAVA unit or any Ofqual-regulated qualification. It concludes with a 20-question multiple-choice assessment, which you must pass at 80% to earn your certificate.
