Tag Archives: business continuity

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