External quality assurance (EQA) contract with Open Awards

We are pleased to announce that we have today extended the current contract in place with Open Awards to deliver external quality assurance (EQA) on our behalf until March 2019.

As part of managing this contract, we are in regular dialogue with Open Awards to ensure that they have the resources in place to deliver a high quality EQA service.

Currently, the Institute is named as EQA provider for around 40% of the published apprenticeship standards.

We will continue to review our model for delivering EQA and the resource behind this as end-point assessment numbers continue to grow.

We intend to run a procurement exercise for a longer term contract to deliver EQA from April 2019 in the next few months.

We will publish further information on the procurement of the new contract shortly.