are all the end-point assessors coming from? “Exponential growth doesn’t really do it justice,” says Colin Bentwood, managing director of the Strategic Development Network, a company providing consultancy, resources, events and research, which worked closely with the Education and Training Foundation (ETF) to develop the Future Apprenticeship resources for employers and providers (see page 14). “Ninety per cent of people are still delivering the old framework apprenticeships. Planning for EPAs is just not the thing they need to do now, so there is an issue around the capacity to deliver EPAs.” Simon Ashworth, chief policy officer of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP), says: “In the next 12 to 18 months, we are looking at the numbers of apprentices reaching end-point assessment rising to half a million a year. “The AELP has described it as a car crash. The


recruitment and training of end-point assessors is not even eligible for funding. The current model is not scalable.” Tom Bewick, chief executive of the Federation


of Awarding Bodies (FAB), holds regular meetings with member organisations, many of which are EPAOs, and other bodies involved in delivering apprenticeships and end-point assessments. “The biggest skillset challenge is getting people who understand their job roles inside out and who are trained to assess,” he says. “It’s going to demand a whole new way of marketing


and promoting this new job role. I think EPAs are a whole new industry in their own right.” Cerian Ayres, the ETF’s head of technical education,


says: “There is a very real need in the sector to prepare for EPAs, ensuring that there are sufficient numbers of trained assessors who can effectively deliver training and assess.” The ETF has developed a range of apprenticehsip


resources, including an online tool for practitioners seeking to become EPAs (see panel on page 14).


Assessor skills


The mix of skills, qualifications and experience required by end-point assessors varies according to the assessment plans attached to each standard. But, broadly speaking, an end-point assessor must be professionally qualified and have up-to-date experience in the job they will be assessing. Not all plans insist on end-point assessors having an assessment qualification, but EPAOs are responsible for their training to ensure that EPAs are rigorous, robust and are applied consistently from apprentice to apprentice, and between different cohorts. Graham Hasting-Evans, group managing director at NOCN, which is one of the government-approved EPAOs, says: “EPAOs, like NOCN, are making an enormous investment in training people coming out of industry, and we are supposed to carry the cost of this before we start earning any money. “In some cases EPAOs cannot find people who are


interested in doing it.” Hasting-Evans and others say the difficulty is that while there are thousands of qualified assessors working on framework-based apprenticeships, many lack recent industry experience. By contrast, those in industry tend to lack assessment experience and


inTUITION ISSUE 34 • WINTER 2018 13


Cameron Law


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