The people who assess our skills have no professional home

The Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors (CIEA) is separating from the University of Hertfordshire. For most of the sector, this will pass as administrative news. It shouldn’t. It reopens a question that further education has ducked for too long: who speaks for the people who carry out vocational assessment?

Tens of thousands of assessors and internal quality assurers work across the Regulated Qualifications Framework. They judge competence, uphold standards, and decide whether a gas engineer, a care worker or a team-leader apprentice has genuinely met the bar. They are the last line before a certificate goes out. Yet unlike almost every profession they serve, they have no professional body of their own.

Teachers have the Chartered College of Teaching. HR professionals have the CIPD (The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development). Accountants, surveyors and engineers each answer to an institution that defines their standard, protects their status and gives their expertise a name that means something. Assessors have nothing equivalent. They earn their CAVA (Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement) or IQA (Internal Quality Assurance) qualification, then work in professional isolation, their development shaped by whichever awarding organisation or employer happens to require it that year.

This is not a status complaint. It has practical consequences the sector feels every day.

Consider continuing professional development. An assessor who invests in genuine CPD (career professional development), updating their occupational knowledge, sharpening their questioning and keeping pace with standards reform, has nowhere neutral to record it and no recognised currency to show for it. Move employer, and the record often resets. An external quality assurer asks for evidence of competence, and the assessor rebuilds a folder from scratch. Effort that should compound instead evaporates.

Consider consistency. Assessment quality varies enormously between providers, and much of that variation traces back to how assessors were trained and how they are kept current. Where no shared professional standard sits above the qualification, no shared floor exists, and regulators end up policing outcomes that a stronger professional culture would have prevented.

At this point a fair objection arrives: assessors already hold the CAVA or equivalent, and Ofqual and the awarding organisations already regulate quality, so what exactly is missing? Neither fills the gap. A qualification certifies that someone could assess competently on the day they passed it; it does nothing to maintain that competence in the years afterwards. Regulation polices outcomes; it does not develop the people producing them, nor give them a standing that travels between employers.

A profession needs the bit in between, the part that keeps practitioners current and recognised, and that is precisely the part that no one currently owns.

So, what would a professional home for assessors need to provide? Three things, at a minimum.

First, a defined standard of practice. One built around vocational assessment as it is really done, not borrowed from academic examining. Assessing a welder on site is not the same task as moderating an exam script, and the standard should say so.

Second, portable CPD that means something. Development an assessor records once and carries between employers, and that awarding organisations and external quality assurers recognise. Recognition is what turns activity into a credential.

Third, a route to recognised status. A way for a skilled, experienced assessor to be identified as exactly that. Not through a one-off qualification sat years ago, but through demonstrated, current, ongoing competence.

None of this is exotic. Every established profession already works this way. The oddity is that assessment, the discipline whose entire job is to judge whether others meet a standard, holds itself to no organised standard of its own.

The CIEA’s change of circumstances is a prompt, not a solution. Whatever emerges from it will continue to serve educational assessment broadly. The specific community of vocational assessors and IQAs, the people making competence decisions in workshops, salons, wards and warehouses, still needs an institution built for them.

I have founded BIAP to address this gap.

The sector spends a great deal of energy worrying about the quality of assessment. It spends almost none on the professional standing of the people who deliver it. Those two problems are the same problem. Until assessors have a professional home, we should not be surprised if the quality of assessment stays as uneven as the support we give those responsible for it.