Coronavirus / Covid-19 ETS Guidance for FE sector for academic year 2021-22
(separate Guidance for HE sector)
This guidance applies to the academic year 2021–2022 and was agreed at the October 2021 meeting of the ETS Wales Committee, the Professional, Statutory and Regulatory Body (PSRB) for Youth Work in Wales: It is expected that students move to full placement hours with the caveat that this is subject to the ongoing Covid situation and will be reviewed as necessary as further guidance is issued by Welsh Government.
If you have any queries relating to this guidance or to your particular programme(s) please don’t hesitate to contact Liz Rose (ETS Adviser) or Steve Drowley (ETS Chair) at ETS Wales:
Coronavirus / Covid-19 ETS Guidance for FE sector for academic year 2020-21
Joint information from NYA England and ETS Wales to Awarding Organisations/Bodies
As you are all aware we are in a rapidly changing environment with advice regarding protecting vulnerable people. Currently, the advice is for education establishments to stay open. This is tempered against a wider environment of self-isolation, social distancing, working from home advice and the avoidance of crowded environments.
With this in mind, we are continuing with temporary adaptations to the Assessment Strategy for the Youth Work Practice qualifications.
There are some units where observation of practice is a requirement, along with completion of activities in a real work environment. This may not be possible for some students now, or in the coming weeks.
To mitigate this we suggest the following:
- The minimum practice hours to be completed remain at 60 for the Level 3 Certificate, although it is understood that learners may complete considerably more.
- For those that have been working in face to face youth work practice environments since September 2019, we would suggest that we can accept a signed and dated witness testimony for all observation based tasks, even though these might be historic (September 2019 onwards).
- We offer the advice to all delivery centres about rescheduling their programmes so that any units that require face to face youth work practice be end-loaded, in the hope that there is freer access to working environments in the coming months.
- We encourage all delivery centres to adapt their resources to offer digitally where possible, using creative assessment tools to ensure that people are still able to complete their programmes of learning.
Awarding Organisations/Bodies must detail within their centre quality management processes each of the following:
- Whether some or all of the permitted learning outcomes from the Units are to be delivered by distance learning.
- The method of distance learning to be used.
- The training content to be covered with distance learning.
- The number of hours to be covered by the distance learning material.
- A robust and auditable method for determining that learners have undertaken distance learning.
Training materials must clearly show learners, how many hours learning they are expected to undertake and that they are given sufficient time to allow them to complete the distance learning. It is also a requirement that the centre checks that the learner has completed the distance learning during training to ensure that appropriate learning has occurred.
We are suggesting that we make this an official temporary amendment to the assessment strategy from September 2020, with ongoing review as government health advice changes.
- Further Guidance:
We appreciate that there is currently uncertainty with regards to the situation that is arising as COVID-19 develops and spreads. With the situation being fluid and contingent upon official guidance from Governments in Westminster and Cardiff, we will regularly review our guidance and ensure any updated information is issued in a timely manner.
- Queries:
If you have any queries relating to this guidance or to your particular programme(s) please don’t hesitate to contact Liz Rose (ETS Adviser) or Steve Drowley (ETS Chair) at ETS Wales:
