This blog was written by Stephen King – SDN Mesma Group Technical Education Specialist
After twenty years working in FE, I’ve seen assessment fashions come and go.
I remember the framework and NVQ days well. At their best, they were about confirming real competence in the workplace. At their worst, assessment could become a grim exercise in collecting evidence, getting signatures and ticking boxes because that’s what the system said to do.
I’ll always remember quality-assuring assessors who were sitting in a cleaning cupboard, ticking boxes, hovering over a bucket. It was a moment that summed up the problem perfectly. The process happened, the paperwork was completed, but it didn’t tell us anything meaningful about competence.
We moved away from that for good reason, and now assessment is changing again.
There’s a lot to welcome in the current reforms. I see that flexibility gives us greater scope to make assessment fit the occupation and less of a one-size-fits-all approach makes sense.
What I’m less sure about is whether the sector remembers the lessons from previous reforms as we embrace the next one.
Ofqual’s recent activity is a useful reminder of why it matters. In 2025/26, it recorded £2.52 million in monetary penalties, and its latest delivery report noted 219 incidents relating to apprenticeship end-point assessment. Those numbers highlight issues that should make the sector pause: delivery failures, errors in assessment materials, malpractice, maladministration and incorrect results.
In August 2026, Ofqual fined an awarding organisation £150,000 following several failures in apprenticeship assessment delivery. These included apprentices being assessed against the wrong version of an assessment plan, and problems with incorrect results and appeals. Some failures also affected skills linked to workplace safety.
This isn’t just a compliance issue. It gets to the heart of whether the assessment system is fit for purpose.
You can have a policy, an assessment plan, an IQA process and an impressive set of procedures, but it doesn’t count for much if the assessment is not valid, consistent and properly controlled. The ultimate question is ‘does the evidence gathered allow us to make reliable judgements about competence?’ Good assessment comes down to some basic factors: assessing the right knowledge and skills, ensuring assessors understand what good evidence looks like, making consistent and trusted judgements, and using IQA to improve assessment rather than to tick a box.
None of that is brand new, and that’s my point.
We’ve been here before in different forms. We moved away from rigid and bureaucratic assessment because it could become disconnected from real competence. But greater flexibility isn’t a lighter-touch version of quality. The more discretion the system gives us, the more important professional judgement, effective controls and robust assurance become.
The new assessment arrangements give awarding organisations more scope to design occupation-based approaches, but they still need to be valid, reliable and properly controlled. Ofqual’s recent enforcement activity clarifies the significant financial and reputational consequences of getting this wrong, as well as the impact on apprentices and employers.
I keep coming back to this. The terminology changes, the structures change and new assessment models come along, but the fundamentals of good assessment haven’t changed nearly as much as we sometimes pretend.
We’ve seen what happens when assessment becomes driven by process rather than competence. We’re now reminded of what happens when systems, controls and quality assurance fail to keep pace with change. Most reforms are simply attempts to strike a better balance.
That’s why the recent Ofqual cases are worth paying attention to. Not because they tell us anything particularly new, but because they remind us of lessons we’ve learned before; design assessments that genuinely measure competence, build assessor expertise, apply quality assurance effectively and maintain confidence in our decisions.
I’m broadly positive about the direction of these reforms. There’s a real opportunity to make assessment more proportionate, relevant and better suited to different occupations. The challenge is in embracing greater flexibility, without treating the principles of credible assessment as outdated language from a previous system.
Validity, consistency, professional judgement and effective quality assurance aren’t the bureaucracy we’re trying to escape; they give us assurance in a world where we can use our discretion.
This is the kind of work we often do with providers and awarding organisations: testing whether assessment design, assessor capability, IQA, and wider controls are strong enough in practice, not just well described on paper.
Catch up on our Apprenticeship Assessment Reform Free Webinar Series from earlier this year.