From time to time you may consider expanding your education and training provision to meet employer demands and workforce needs in the future
Many factors might impact on the number of learners that you decide to take year-to-year, such as local or national workforce needs, commissioning, internal aspirations or pressures, and the current recruitment drive for Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) in the NHS in England.
Our quality assurance approach provides flexibility for you to consider such opportunities and increase your learner numbers. However, you may need to engage with us around any changes, so we can be sure approved programmes continue to deliver quality education and training that prepares individuals to practise safely and effectively.
There are three things you should consider when deciding whether to notify us of your learner increase.
1. The impact to our standards
Increasing your learner numbers may significantly impact the resources you have available to deliver the programme within both academic and practice-based learning settings. This is likely to change how a programme continues to meet our standards across a range of areas, including:
- the availability of appropriate, experienced staff to support teaching and learning;
- the provision of sufficient resources to support learners and their progression on a programme; and
- the availability of suitable practice-based learning settings and supervisors to support the development of professional practice.
2. The size of the change to learner numbers
As a guide, you should consider telling us about learner number changes of around 25 per cent or more (per cohort). In our experience, increases or decreases of this size may significantly change the way programmes meet our standards. However, this is only a starting point. There may be changes below this level which you feel still significantly change the way our standards are met.
3. Engaging with us
You can change your learner numbers at any time. If you decide you need to notify us, considering the impact to our standards and the size of the learner increase, you can do so via our major change process. We can review the changes before or after you make them.
Where there are very significant increases, we may want to organise a visit to discuss the changes in more detail. However, we aim to avoid this where we can. You may need to make further changes to your programme after increasing learner numbers, if we deem certain areas of our standards are not being met.
To notify us of your learner and cohort increases, please complete a major change notification form and we will discuss this further with you.
You can also contact us informally for some initial advice on how best to proceed.
Tel. 44 (0)20 7840 9812