What differentiates City & Guilds iTQ from those offered by other Awarding Bodies is the extra support we can provide to help you deliver the qualification.  An important part of this is through our experienced EVs who have been advising centres and providing feedback on our qualifications.  Here are some things you can expect your City & Guilds EV to do:

1.  Recognise the wider range of "real purpose" evidence of the Mandatory Unit
Evidence does not need to be from paid work or in a normal workplace.  Your EV knows that it can include any 'work' that has a purpose, other than demonstrating IT skills.  This can be voluntary work, activities with a club or community group and also personal work, such as applying for jobs or completing assignments for other subjects.

2.  Recognise e-Quals 07 (7266) and e-Quals (7262) units for iTQ
The e-Quals 07 units map 100% to iTQ.  Also, most old e-Quals (7262) units have 100% coverage of the relevant iTQ units.  Check the e-skills UK website if you're not sure which these apply to.

A candidate with an e-Quals 07 unit certficate can just keep a copy of that in their portfolio.  Even without certification, the candidate can keep a copy of a completed assignment as sufficient demonstration of competence for a unit.  Where any of the optional units are APA'd, those skills should also be demonstrated in the evidence for the mandatory unit, especially if the centre has only seen the certificates.

3.  Accept recognised certificates from other Awarding Bodies as APA
e-skills has a list of certificates that should be recognised as APA for specific units.  Your City & Guilds EV must accept these if they are part of an iTQ porfolio.

4.  Encourage the use of Expert Witnesses
Expert Witnesses can be very helpful for organisations that have experienced staff who can reasonably evaluate IT skills but who aren't going to go through an A unit training/accreditation.  This is particularly important for bespoke or specialist software.  The Expert Witness can be someone who:

• is training the candidate on the software
• has responsibility for the successful use of the software in the candidate's team.

5.  Encourage the use of the Bespoke and Specialist Software unit
For most companies, skills on bespoke and specialist software are a major part of their IT training and it makes sense to put htis at the heart of their iTQ programme.  The tasks that are used for 'holistic' assessment can be focused on this unit but with cross-referencing evidence to other units chosen.  For the Bespoke and Specialist Software unit they would almost certainly want to use Expert Witnesses.

6.  Encourage use of e-portfolios
E-portfolios help to reduce the burden of managing evidence.  Your City & Guilds EV will work with any e-portfolio, as long as the regular requirements of portfolios can be met.  We also endorse a number of e-portfolios - Forward, Learning Assistant, One File and SkilSure - but you can work with other e-portfolios as long as you check with your EV first. 

Our EVs will also accept e-portfolios (or lighter touch portfolios) produced by centres.  Observations can be recorded onto digital recorder, downloaded onto laptop and stored on CD or memory stick.  You won't be asked for a printed transcript of recordings, or a minute-by-minute list of what has been recorded - a bullet point content with reference to the units/AOCs being claimed should be sufficient.

City & Guilds has have set up a partnership with SkilSure e-portflios.  Under our iTQ Plus package (4322-21/22/23), we are offering centres access to an e-portfolio system at a special price which includes the registration on City & Guilds iTQ and the cost of the SkilSure e-portfolio.

7.  Work constructively with centres to help them be successful in delivering iTQ
iTQ is new and frequently changing.  It's not a typical NVQ, because there isn't really an IT User occupation, which makes it unsuitable for some of the things which normally shope NVQs. 

City & Guilds iTQ EVs will:

• be open to innovative approaches
• focus on what really shows candidates being properly assessed.  So they won't focus on bureaucracies and surface details of evidence collection and presentation
• provide feedback in terms of what centes can do to meet the standard required, instead of presenting negative information.

8.  Keep up to date
iTQ keeps evolving so City & Guilds iTQ EVs will keep in touch with these developments through updates, briefings and an EV Discussion Forum.

One area of significant change is the move to the Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF).  In England, this will replace the current National Qualifications Framework.  It will credit rate all units and allow for much more flexibility in the way centres and learners combine those units into programmes.  There are many projects testing out the QCF (referred to as QCF Tests and Trials), one of these is a QCF version of iTQ.  There are many similarities between the QCF iTQ and the current iTQ, however, the iTQ QCF has the following differences:

• there are no NVQ/VRQ concepts, so the NVQ Code of Practice doesn't apply
• there are no requirements for A1 assessors
• the mandatory unit can be assessed through a simulation task.

There are some pilot centres currently running the QCF iTQ tests and trials, which started in September.  We will keep you and your iTQ EVs informed on these developments.