Exams regulator Ofqual has fined an awarding body £15,000 for “serious” failures including conflicts of interest with a test centre it shares an office with.
An investigation found east Yorkshire-based ProQual “failed to identify and monitor” conflicts with Yorkshire Skills Academy (YSA), a test centre and consultancy which has the same owners, between 2018 and 2022.
ProQual, which has more than 270 centres, admitted that it “did not recognise” the risks around the YSA delivering qualifications to 18 of its own staff, their families and academy employees.
It also failed to put an “arms-length arrangement” in place to avoid conflicts of interest with staff who worked in the same office or who had been outsourced from YSA to centres that ProQual had recently onboarded.
The Ofqual notice, published yesterday, said: “Such an arrangement may ordinarily have been acceptable, but for the reasons given above, a potential conflict of interest arose because there was a risk that ProQual would not be as robust in reviewing and monitoring the [internal quality assessor] (IQA) at the newly onboarded centre, given that the IQA was being undertaken by YSA.
“At the very least, a reasonable and well-informed observer may perceive that to be the case.”
When asked why it has taken two and a half years between conclusion of the investigation and publication of the notice, an Ofqual spokesperson said it has no set timetables for completing enforcement cases.
ProQual and YSA are headquartered in Newport, east Yorkshire, and are both owned by Janet and Gordon Grant.
The Ofqual investigation also found a range of other failures, including not applying its centre onboarding policy to new higher risk centres or centres it worked with on a longer term, and addressing quality issues it had identified, in some cases related to level 1 health and safety construction certificates. Concerns related to six centres in total.
This included one centre that failed to keep quality assessment records until two years after approval, and another where no records were kept of action taken over a suspicious learner portfolio.
Further “unsubstantiated allegations” are referred to in the Ofqual notice, but have been redacted from the public version. An Ofqual spokesperson told FE Week this was to protect parties involved.
In deciding on the fine, the regulator said the findings were “serious” and spanned a “wide range” of ProQual’s work, at different stages of the qualification awarding lifecycle.
It concluded: “They represent failures to either exercise appropriate risk management and internal control measures, or to document and retain a contemporaneous account of its activity.
“While the conduct was not intentional, ProQual has demonstrated a lack of awareness of its obligations both in relation to documenting evidence and record keeping and the potential for conflicts of interest to arise.”
The regulator refused to endorse the company’s claim that the rule breaches cause “no adverse effects” and that it is “effective in managing any observed risks”.
However, Ofqual accepted ProQual’s assurances that the failures were “administrative in nature” and “largely record keeping failures”, although it noted that some of the documents proving this were only provided “at a late stage in the investigation process”.
In mitigation, the regulator noted that there was “no evidence” that issues were intentional or were “motivated by a desire to save money”.
The company has also agreed to fund an independent audit of its work to check whether its processes and record keeping have improved.
ProQual was approached for comment.
Your thoughts