Audio lesson · 8 minutes
What good evidence looks like
Evidence is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the demonstration that a funded activity genuinely happened as recorded, and it has three properties.
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Chapters
- Three properties
- What to hold, by question
- Evidence for changes
Transcript
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Introduction
What good evidence looks like. Evidence is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the demonstration that a funded activity genuinely happened as recorded, and it has three properties.
Three properties
Most evidence failures in further education are failures of the second property rather than the first. The evidence exists. It was seen, checked and stored by somebody who has since left, in a place nobody thinks to search. Retrievability is not administrative tidiness. At audit, evidence that cannot be found within a reasonable time does not exist.
What to hold, by question
Organising evidence by question rather than by document type makes gaps obvious. Most colleges can answer the first and third questions easily and struggle with the second and fourth. Where a stream has specific requirements, such as off-the-job training records for apprenticeships or the learning support chain, those sit under the fourth question.
Evidence for changes
This is the cheapest control in the entire assurance framework and the one most often missing. A free-text reason recorded at the point of change answers a question that would otherwise take a day.
Read it instead
What good evidence looks likeThe written module carries the same content at three depths, with the worked examples, the pitfalls and the sources.
Sources
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