From Assessor to IQA

Understanding the Professional Shift in Further Education & Skills

🎯 The Core Identity Shift

You stop owning learners and start owning standards. Your responsibility broadens from supporting your learners to safeguarding standards across the entire team.

Key Transitions

→ Focus Shift

From: Individual learner progress

To: Standards across the whole team

→ Activity Change

From: Making assessment decisions

To: Evaluating others' decisions

→ Perspective Shift

From: Individual cases

To: Patterns and trends across the system

→ Professional Stance

From: Fixing things yourself

To: Professional dialogue and reflection

The Most Powerful IQA Question:

"Can you talk me through how you reached that decision?"

The Hardest Parts

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Challenging peers you respect – More experienced assessors, former mentors, colleagues who "have always done it this way"
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Maintaining professional distance – Without losing professional trust with colleagues you've worked alongside for years
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Resisting the urge to "fix" – The role is not about re-assessing work, but evaluating if decisions meet VACSR criteria

Your Most Powerful Tools

📋 VACSR Framework

Valid, Authentic, Current, Sufficient, Reliable – Your decision evaluation criteria

🔄 Standardisation

Regular professional conversations about what good evidence looks like and how much is "enough"

📊 Pattern Recognition

Looking for trends: Are multiple assessors misinterpreting criteria? Is feedback consistently strong or vague?

🔍 Professional Curiosity

Know the specifications, understand requirements, stay updated – and be confident asking questions

The Real Purpose

Moving from assessor to IQA isn't about stepping away from learners.

It's about protecting all learners – even the ones you'll never meet.

It requires courage, clarity, and professionalism.

And when it's done well, it quietly holds the system together.