At the end of the 2023-24 academic year, we concluded our first assessment of all HCPC-approved education providers following the introduction of our current quality assurance model in September 2021.
This means that all education providers:
- have engaged at least once with our current model;
- are performing as they need to in relation to our education standards; and
- are more familiar with our ongoing requirements, including how to interact with us moving forward in line with the principles of our model.
The insight these reviews have given us is invaluable. We are now able to confidently state what we have seen, and use this insight to contextualise and set out what we need to understand better to inform judgements through our regulatory assessments.
We are also able to reflect this insight back to the sector, and help and guide stakeholders on our requirements linked to the current state of education and training for the professions we regulate.
We continue to be aware of challenges that lie ahead, particularly with:
- financial sustainability;
- learner number expansions continuing at pace for many professions, to meet the needs of the population; and
- diversification of education and training routes, including a marked increase in work-based routes.
We are continuing to play our part in responding to challenges, ensuring we are working as far upstream as possible to ensure public protection.
We do this by:
- understanding what is happening in the health and care and education sectors;
- helping our stakeholders understand the current picture of education and training; and
- helping our stakeholders understand our flexible, non-prescriptive, and outcome-focused standards and requirements, in the contexts in which they operate.
In the 2024-25 academic year and beyond, we are focusing on three key areas in our work:
- Working with our stakeholders to consider and reduce regulatory overlap, in keeping with independent regulatory and advisory roles.
- Engaging with our stakeholders well, building on trusted relationships to inform our own insight when undertaking our quality assurance assessments, and to help others to understand what is important to us.
- Embedding proactive reviews of data and insight as fundamental within our work, to inform our view of risk for the education providers we approve.
There is a lot of work that needs to be done by our stakeholders to meet future challenges, and we are confident that the education sector is well positioned to lead and enable developments, whilst maintaining high quality in education and training.
We will continue to play our important regulatory role to ensure this is the case, take action to support education providers and others, and to prevent harm when our high regulatory standards are not met.
