Business and Administration Level 4 Diploma (10337): Centre guidance on adaptations for 2020/21

In line with the Government’s advice that teaching and assessment should continue this year, we have prepared this guidance to support centres during 2020/21 in the delivery and assessment of our Level 4 Diploma in Business Administration.

Recognising that the disruption caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic means some candidates taking vocational qualifications have already experienced lost teaching and learning time, Ofqual has enabled Awarding Organisations to put in place adaptations to qualifications in 2020-21 to mitigate the impact of this disruption and respond to any ongoing or future public health measures so that candidates are able to complete their qualification and progress to further study or work.

This centre guidance is to support you and your candidates to complete assessment, while following public health guidance.

Links to the operational guidance are:

• FE operational guidance (England)
• Schools operational guidance (England)
• Operational guidance for schools and settings (Wales)
• Information and guidance for educational settings (Northern Ireland)

Equalities and Objectivity

It is important that any adaptations to assessment consider the ability of students to access them and, as far as possible, ensure that any adaptations do not advantage or disadvantage any student.

For students with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND), centres will be best placed to accommodate this when making adapted assessments available for their students. Reasonable adjustments and access arrangements must be made available and recognised wherever possible. 

If you require any guidance or support about making reasonable adjustments for your students, please contact the OCR Special Requirements Team on srteam@ocr.org.uk.

Professional discussions must be fair and evidence-based to reflect what the student has achieved.  When leading conversations, writing testimonies or reviewing evidence you should continue to be aware of the potential effects of students’ characteristics (including protected characteristics) on assessment judgements and ensure that they are not affecting your judgements. Protected characteristics are legally defined and include a student’s sex, race, religion/belief, disability, gender reassignment or sexual orientation.

Guidance on the importance of objectivity and avoiding unconscious bias can be taken from the section in Ofqual’s publication for schools and colleges who are providing centre assessment grades for students taking GCSEs, A levels and other performance tables qualifications.  The section ‘Unconscious effects on objectivity’ is applicable to centre assessment in general.

Permitted adaptations

The rationale for the types of adaptations is to mitigate the impact of disruption already caused to teaching and learning and to respond to any ongoing or future public health measures so that candidates are able to complete their qualification and progress.  Disruption may prevent candidates from completing the qualification in the normal way. 

These adaptations are for anybody taking the Business Administration qualification, whether they are starting to work towards the qualification this year or continuing on programme and intending to finish this year or later.  The adaptations are in place only for the academic year 2020/21.  

Normally, students evidence the application of knowledge in their own working environment (e.g. an analysis of their employer’s organisational procedures) to produce written work supported with the real work context and centres use sufficient levels of supervision to authenticate the work of the student.

Students who have been unable to complete their assessment due to disruption caused by the pandemic are permitted to:

• Use professional discussion as an alternative to gathering further written evidence from students

These adaptations are in place for the 2020/21 academic year.  We encourage you to complete the assessment and submission process at the earliest opportunity.

If for any reason you cannot adapt the assessments in the ways that have been described below whilst ensuring the required level of supervision and checks to authenticate the evidence that is being produced, the assessments will have to be rescheduled for a time when it is possible to continue with them as normal.

Permissible adaptations

It should be possible to generate knowledge-based evidence in the normal way. If it is not possible, alternative methods should be considered, such as:

• professional discussion as an alternative to gathering further written evidence from learners. Professional discussions should be backed up, where possible, with other authenticated student-generated evidence or reports. Where written evidence is weak then a professional discussion can be used to try and draw out further evidence from the student.  Professional discussions with OCR students to capture evidence of their knowledge/understanding can be digitally recorded. (Audio-only recordings are suitable.) 
• cross-referencing to previous achievement in other units and/or other qualifications. If you are completing the Level 4 Business Administration apprenticeship, there might be evidence of knowledge and understanding from skills-based units or assessment criteria in the competence qualification, OCR Level 4 NVQ Diploma in Business Administration. 

Alternative forms of evidence must meet the assessment requirements and criteria and this needs to be clearly referenced.

Centres and students must give consideration to Safeguarding and the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) when using technology to support any part of the assessment process.

General guidance on producing evidence

Professional discussions, question and answer discussions must not permit the use of leading questions.

You must be assured that the student’s work is their own. Students must not submit work that includes evidence copied from other sources without proper attribution

Audio recordings must be clearly audible.  Recordings to be viewed at a later date must confirm the name of the student, date of activity.

Centres must give consideration to Safeguarding and the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) when using live video and audio evidence and when recording it.  Consent must be obtained from all parties who need to be part of the activity that is being viewed remotely or recorded.

Quality assurance

It is important for all internal assessments that robust monitoring processes are implemented by your centre.  These monitoring processes should include effective dialogue with students where needed to ensure the evidence being generated is both individual and authentic.

There are no changes to the sampling rules for these internal assessments.  We require you to submit the same amount of work for external moderation as you would under normal circumstances. 

These adaptations are in place for 2020/21.  We encourage you to complete the assessment and submission process at the earliest opportunity.

You must complete an ‘Adaption Declaration’ included within a 2020/21 cover sheet, that replaces the standard submission cover sheet when you submit candidate evidence and a copy of the Interchange claim. This 2020/21 cover sheet can be downloaded below. You will need to confirm that any adaptations to assessment are in line with the permitted adaptations for 2020/21 outlined here.

Completed assessments can be submitted to OCR in the normal way for external moderation.  We would strongly advise the use of electronic evidence during this period, guidance for which can be found in the centre handbook.

10337 submission cover sheet (2020/21)