Education quality assurance and enhancement – how we work with professional bodies

Professional bodies play an invaluable role within education quality assurance and enhancement. They often define profession-specific expectations within pre-registration education and training through curriculum guidance and education standards, and support education providers in developing new and existing high-quality programmes.

Together, we have a shared commitment to the quality of education for health and care professionals, preparing them for contemporary practice. While we operate in the same quality space, HCPC objectives focus on fitness to practice for public protection, and professional bodies focus on ‘fitness for the profession’.

From our perspective, we highly value close working with professional bodies, which helps inform our regulatory assessments with a good range of information and contextual intelligence. This contributes to us making well-informed decisions and helps us focus our resources where they are needed.

When it comes to the professions we regulate, professional bodies are important to our understanding of professional expectations and needs linked to programme design and delivery, as well as key challenges which may be faced by each profession and / or specific stakeholders within the education and healthcare sectors. 

Professional body expectations and regulatory requirements 

Many professional bodies accredit, endorse, or approve education programmes against their own criteria. Often, professional bodies set expectations for areas like entry requirements to programmes, programme design and delivery (including curriculum guidance), resourcing arrangements including staff / learner ratios, and the duration and range of practice-based learning. These are determined according to their expert views and insight about education and training needs, which will often vary across different professions.

Our standards of education and training (SETs) are flexible and outcome-focused, intended to ensure those who complete programmes meet our requirements for registration (namely our profession specific standards of proficiency, and our cross professional standards of conduct, performance, and ethics).

While we do not define specific requirements for areas like staff / learner ratios or the duration and range of practice-based learning, we do assess education providers’ approaches in these areas. We assess whether our standards are met by considering evidence and the context of each programme.

Understanding professional body expectations helps us to set context, to understand what normal and best practice looks like, and to ask appropriate questions of education providers when making our judgements.

It is possible for programmes to not meet professional body expectations but to be approved by us. In these cases, we fully explore education provider approaches, understanding context and professional body expectations as noted above. We make an independent judgement on whether our standards are met based on the approach of the education provider and the outcome-focused nature of our standards.

Having said this, our analysis shows that education providers who align with professional body expectations, and who work with professional bodies when developing new and existing programmes, are often better placed to align with and meet our own regulatory standards. 

Strategic education engagement with professional bodies 

We also work with professional bodies to share our understanding of current areas of interest, concerns, and initiatives being undertaken in relation to the education and training of the professions we regulate.

We chair an education-focused forum meeting with professional bodies to exchange information about quality assurance and education and training, with the aim of supporting and assuring high-quality education and training in our professions. We also hold regular one-to-one meetings with named contacts within each professional body, to build trusted relationships and enable good engagement.

This all influences our work, for example helping us to define the questions we ask education providers in our regular performance review monitoring exercise or helping us when setting context for our education provider and programme level assessments.

If professional bodies have made changes to their advice or guidance, our normal expectation is that education providers have at least considered these changes. This is in line with our expectations for education providers to ensure their programme is fit for purpose, and that their curricula are up to date. Whether education providers have considered changes, and what they have done in response to them, informs our risk-informed view of each education provider and programme.

Working together through programme level assessments 

Our quality assurance model is flexible by design. This means that we design our assessment activities depending on the areas we need to explore. We aim to dovetail our assessments with professional bodies where this is helpful for education providers, professional bodies and us.

When an education provider seeks HCPC approval and professional body endorsement / accreditation at the same time, we can apply the flexibility of our model to help assist them. However, as we no longer centre our quality assurance activities around a physical or virtual ‘visit’, we may not run joint activities (such as meetings or visits) with professional bodies as part of our assessment activities.

We now aim to be more proactive and purposeful when engaging with professional bodies through our assessments, to ensure we are working together and sharing information in a consistent and structured way. This should add more value to our assessments when compared to our interactions in our former quality assurance model, where we would sometimes overlap with professional bodies at physical or virtual assessment events. The value of this overlapping was highly variable, as it was centred around a short event (rather than a whole assessment process with key assessment stages over many months),driven by the assessment panels involved and subject to logistical limitations of those events.

Where the professional body would like us to, we have established information-sharing arrangements, which enable us to share detailed information to help professional bodies understand and influence our assessments (and vice versa).

We formally consider intelligence provided by professional bodies as part of our activities and within our decision-making. This gives us a clearer picture of the quality of education provision and its alignment with our standards. This includes where professional bodies or their stakeholders have concerns about the quality of education provision. Understanding intelligence is a key pillar of our quality assurance model, and the information provided by professional bodies is a key part the intelligence we consider.