Category Archives: COVID-19

Posts for the COVID-19 portal

LAUNCH OF COVID-19 APPRENTICESHIP PORTAL

The Federation’s CEO, Matt lambert issued a press release on Friday 3rd April which announced the launch of the Federation’s “COVID-19 Apprenticeship Portal” where all those involved in Apprenticeship delivery, assessment and quality assurance were invited to submit workable solutions for the continuation of training and assessment activities during the crisis which may become best practices for use by others.  The survey will also identify regulatory and other bottlenecks. Initially, the information will be gathered via an open-ended online survey. This initiative has been launched in a bid to protect the UK’s Apprentices and vocational training during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Federation will review and collate survey responses and identify the key issues and challenges being faced and, where appropriate, take any proposed improvements or practical solutions to government agencies/ regulators for urgent approval. A key objective is also to provide a free to access portal where best practices and experiences can be shared across the Apprenticeship sector

COVID-19 response survey

Please see the COVID-19 survey for all apprenticeship stakeholders here:

link to survey

This initiative has been launched in a bid to protect the UK’s Apprentices and vocational training during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Federation will review and collate survey responses and identify the key issues and challenges being faced and, where appropriate, take any proposed improvements or practical solutions to government agencies/ regulators for urgent approval.

STILL AVAILABLE TO SUPPORT YOU

The Federation is actively monitoring and responding to the current challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic which are currently facing all those involved in the delivery, assessment and quality assurance of Apprenticeships.

We have already implemented a number of contingency measures to facilitate as far as is possible, a business as usual service for all our customers.

Well before the Government’s announcement for people to stay at home, we had set up all of our office-based staff with the technology and office equipment to enable them to work from home. This meant that we had no break in our customer service help desk facility and were on hand to deal with an increasing number of calls from all those worried about the impact of the current restrictions on their normal business operations.

INTERIM APPRENTICESHIP CERTIFICATION ARRANGEMENTS

We swiftly implemented an interim solution to provide an alternative solution to confirming an Apprentice’s achievement of their Apprenticeship. Normally, a printed certificate would be produced but lack of access to office printers and certificate stocks has made this impossible, in many cases.

All of our sector bodies have business continuity plans in place and are continuing to process Apprenticeship certification claims submitted via our online certification systems.  With the appropriate government department approval, across the 3 nations, the Federation have adapted their systems to automatically generate an Apprenticeship Achievement Confirmation e-mail at the point when a sector body approves the Apprenticeship claim as having met all of the specified Framework requirements.

In the interim period, providers can use this email confirmation notification to confirm Apprenticeship achievement with the individual Apprentice, their employer and relevant funding bodies etc.

All printed certificates will be generated and despatched once business operations return to normal.

Our standard 10 day Service Level Agreement (SLA) for processing Apprenticeship claims has also been extended temporarily to 15 days, to allow for additional processing time during this challenging time.

You can read further details on this here