Functions of the Level 4 Award in the Internal Quality Assurance of Assessment Processes and Practice

The function of the IQA in the Level 4 Award in the Internal Quality Assurance of Assessment Processes and Practice

Functions of internal quality assurance is to ensure quality throughout the learner journey. Within the Level 4 Award in the Internal Quality Assurance of Assessment Processes and Practice you are trained to become similar to a quality manager where it’s your responsibility to ensure that your courses are completed to the appropriate standard and that the staff involved in training and assessor are doing their job correctly. IQA is like management where the focus is to ensure quality throughout the qualification. If we deliver the Level 4 Award in the Internal Quality Assurance of Assessment Processes and Practice and don’t do it properly, it will be detrimental to our own reputation, the reputation of the awarding body and devalue the qualification. The only way to overcome this is to ensure that we meet the qualification requirements throughout the learner journey and ensure that we develop trainers and assessors so they can do the job well by ensuring that any decision that they make are accurate and consistent.

How the Level 4 Award in the Internal Quality Assurance of Assessment Processes and Practice relates to quality

In other industries, quality assurance is about ensuring that the products that you sell or the service that you provide meet customer requirements so that the customer is happy with what they are given and then to ensure that we comply with quality standards and legislation along the way. Again, it’s about improving quality and making sure that the customer and in this case the learner gets a good experience.

In any industry, if there is quality assurance, you won’t know what is being delivered and therefore you will be unable to improve your services. In many qualifications, think about GCSE’s or other tests where you are given a multiple-choice exam, you can generally tell if teaching was good as you would have higher pass rates. Obviously, there will be some element down to learner ability but nonetheless overtime, higher pass rates show an indication of good teaching. Now with assessment, there needs to be another form of measuring the performance of your assessors. In any management position, you need to monitor your employee’s performance and quality assurance is no difference.

The role of assessors in the Level 4 Award in the Internal Quality Assurance of Assessment Processes and Practice

When my assessors teach the Level 4 Award in the Internal Quality Assurance of Assessment Processes and Practice, we need to monitor the quality of work produced by the learners and monitor the assessment decisions made to check for mistakes or incorrect decisions and to improve performance.We can improve performance by conducting standardisation meetings to ensure our assessors understand and interpret the qualification and learning outcomes the same way, so it doesn’t matter which assessor is assigned to a learner. We also need to ensure that assessors improve by participating in CPD whether this is in-house or at another training centre, but we need to ensure that they improve.  Assessors may be new to the organisation or new to assessing therefore we need to support our assessors to ensure that they can do the job.

Following the completion of the Level 4 Award in the Internal Quality Assurance of Assessment Processes and Practice, it is the role of the IQA to communicate with the awarding body and submit any documentation requested by the awarding body and ensure any action plans that have been identified have bee done.