Performance review requirements 2022-23 - what to expect

Frequently Asked Questions

• What risk is the HCPC assessing through this process?

  Our standards of education and training are outcome focused, to ensure those who complete programmes meet our proficiency standards. Through this process, we are considering your performance. Ultimately, this enables us to make a judgement about continued alignment with our standards. When assessing risk, we have this in mind – are there potential issues with learners meeting the proficiency standards? 

• Do you need institution-wide reflections, or just relating to our HCPC programmes?

  We ask that you reflect at the institution level wherever possible. We are primarily interested in the quality of your HCPC programmes, but things that happen at the institution level will impact on that quality so should be reflected on through your portfolio. 

• Who reviews portfolios?

  Your HCPC contact will review your portfolio for completeness and understanding. We will then pass this to a team of professional experts who come to conclusions against the quality themes. We also engage a service user expert advisor to review service user areas. 

• Will you visit us as part of the process?

  Not as standard, but this is an option should the situation require it. We design quality assurance activities based on what we see. We will always prefer the least burdensome option for our stakeholders, but there are times when the only way of fully exploring a quality theme is to visit your institution. When designing quality activities, we will work with you to consider the most effective way of addressing areas. 

• There are sections within the portfolio which are not relevant to my institution, what should I do?

  You should speak to your HCPC contact. We have provided a bespoke portfolio based on our understanding of your institution, but recognise that not all already may be relevant. We may be able to remove areas from your required return, or help you to understand how you can reflect on the areas noted. 

• We don’t deliver apprenticeship programmes, why is this included in our portfolio?

  We’ve deliberately included this for all pre-registration Higher Education Institutions in England, regardless of whether you currently deliver apprenticeship programmes or not. This is because there are still likely relevant reflections you can make based on what is happening in your region, provider, or profession. 

  For example, you may be considering delivering apprenticeship programmes in the future, you may be involved in trailblazer groups and their ongoing work, and / or there may be impact of other apprenticeship programmes within your region (for example, on placement supply). We consider this is an important area for you to reflecting on linked to the sustainability or your provision. 

• How much information should we provide?

  We've provided guidance about this in the portfolio submission, but haven't provided a 'level' to reach. This is because the level needed will depend on what's happened at the institution - for example, you may have had professional body reviews in the review period, you may not have. The important thing to do in these situations is to reflect as appropriate to what's happened, to enable external people to understand what's happened and what you have learned. 

• I am finding I’m repeating myself a lot in the portfolio, how should I approach this?

  You can cross reference between sections, but our intention is that sections do not crossover wherever possible. If you can, only report an area within one theme. For example, you may have reflections about your use of technology which are linked to your response to COVID – you should only report this area in one of the two themes. The important thing is to provide the reflection, rather than where that reflection is contained. 

• Can we provide hyperlinks to evidence?

  Yes – but please ensure you only give us information which is relevant to your submission. This means not providing whole documents in most instances. We would prefer you to provide extracts or quotes within your portfolio submission. We do not need to see lots of documentation for context, information should be relevant to your reflections.  

• How should we reflect on the revised SOPs through the portfolio?

  The key themes within the revised SOPs should be covered at the institution level wherever possible. We recognise that you will often have institution-wide approaches to reviewing your curricula, and therefore you should focus at this level where you can. 

  We also ask for specific reflection at a programme level, which will likely include some reflection on the profession specific changes – however we do not ask for mapping to the revised SOPs or tracked changes versions of your module descriptors. 

• My institution does not have externally available data points – what does this mean for the process?

  To remain confident with provider performance, we rely on regular supply of data and intelligence to help us understand provider performance outside of the periods where we directly engage with them, but we recognise that not all providers will be included in the external data returns we use. 

  Through the performance review process, where we have gaps in data, we would like to work with providers to establish regular data reporting to the HCPC to satisfy our normative requirements. 

  Where risk assessment allows, we will lengthen the period between performance review engagements from two years (which is the historical norm for the HCPC), up to a maximum of 5 years. Where sufficient data points are not available, the maximum length of time we will allow between performance review engagements will be two years. This is so we can continue to understand risks in an ongoing way where data is not available.