I just want to address something. Tamara’s just put in the questions that feeling like validation should be done continuously, not just after the first time, and we are going to talk about that schedule that’s there. But yes, we need to be looking at how often we validate, and it’s not just, the standards at the moment say at least once over the five-year cycle, but if you’re doing a validation of student judgements once in five years, how are you really ensuring quality? And what we’re talking about here is not minimum compliance requirements. We’re talking about quality.

If you make changes to things, if you have a new trainer come on, all these different things change the risk that comes with the assessment process, and post-assessment validation is our only way of checking that things have been done right and that we’ve got that quality there. So I agree with Tamara. It would be something that I would be wanting to do on a regular basis.

Couldn’t agree more. Especially that post-assessment validation, I think, if you can build it into your working week, build it into your normal daily processes. Absolutely. You should. With some fantastic tools, I’m going to plug Cloud Assess a little bit here, but within our tools, you’ve got the ability to drive statistical samples. You can focus on new staff at different sample sizes and rates, and that is instant. So when judgements are made, when results are finalised, those items that you’ve predefined based on your risk profiles and your error of judgement really allow you to get really effective with that post-assessment validation as those results are occurring, as those competences are being finalised. And yeah, what better way to deal with a problem than before it becomes any bigger.

So, this sort of looks at the cycle that we have here, and over on the right-hand side we’re starting with Stage One, and this is what we’ve talked about before, pre-assessment validation. So we need to make sure that we’re doing the validation of the unit of competency and the tools that we’re using prior to using them. If you go and make major changes to something, then you need to go and do another validation, because it’s different and you need to make sure that it’s still meeting the requirements of what you need. So that pre-assessment validation is that very important Stage One.

Stage Two is where we are going to go and deliver and conduct, and that’s where our processes come in. So if you’ve got a new trainer or new assessor, you know, there might be some things in there that you need to do to make sure that your practices are being followed the way that they should, that they’re marking the right way. Have some moderation before results are given out to students.

And then we have our Stage Three, post-assessment validation. So, looking at afterwards: have our assessments given us some valid, reliable results? Are they going to be consistent? Are they meeting the requirements of the unit? Are they authentic student work? We’ve got a big issue at the moment with plagiarism, using tools like ChatGPT, and that’s a whole other discussion, which I’m sure will come up in the questions. But looking at our assessment design around that, and having that post validation, that feeds into our sessions. So we’ve got session one, session two, session three. That’s about training, providing the learning, giving time for practice, capturing the evidence, achieving competency, and then validating at the end.