Case Study: Learning Assistant

Centre: Birmingham City Council NVQ Assessment Centre
e-portfolio: Learning Assistant
Qualifications Supported:

• Health and Social Care Adults levels 2, 3 & 4
• Health and Social Care Children's level 3

Michell O'Driscoll is Lead IV at Birmingham NVQ Assessment Centre.  Here she tells us more about her centres experience of e-porfolios:

"We started to look at e-portfolios because our centre needed to increase throughput of NVQs to meet government targets in regards of qualified staff.

We identified that we could not do this by continuing with traditional paper based method of assessment. We went through a lengthy project initiation to identify a suitable system that would meet all our expectations and business requirements and ran a six month pilot. Feedback from candidates was very positive.

All enjoyed the experience of electronic learning even those who had never used a computer before. It decreased the time taken to complete a portfolio, from what was 18 months paper-based to five to six months for those using an e-portolio. In fact two candidates completed in just four months.

Having no heavy paper based portfolios proved a great advantage. "