Skills England deputy director Carmel Grant opened to over 700 virtual guests with a vision for the heart of apprenticeships and Skills England. Revision for all standards, three trances over the next year, first tranche in revision should hear they are on the list before Christmas.

Setting the vision. Understand our nations skills needs and improve our skills offer. The task, to simplify access to skills to boost economic growth. And to mobilise employers and other partners, co-creating solutions to meet national and local skills needs. Carmel outlined the step to create an expert pool merging route panels and Trailblazers. More focus on data to improve performance and keeping employers at heart of apprenticeship. Skills compass a tool for the future.

Moving to assessment reform. Proportional actions , to remove duplication and allow assessments to be taken earlier. Making sure assessment is at the right time in the right place. We want quality but feedback has shown need to simplify and improve apprentice experience, stopping duplication. Flexibility to streamline the process, choosing when is the right time for assessment and allowing mock assessment during training. Enabling the flexibility quality will be maintained as assessment will continue to sit inside the standards. While standards continue to be reformed, we will look at the content but the key process will be on the standards.

Those in review (express delivery operative) will be dealt with on a case by case basis.

New assessment plans will be formed in two parts. Summarising content and mapping the KS units to the outcome in part one. There will be mandatory skills statements, English and maths could feature in first part of plan, including assessment details of time scales ect. Second part includes regulatory details and Skills England requirements.

Employers remain the occupational experts, their expertise used to underpin the standards and underpin the assessment. Continuous improvement, sharing data with assessment organisations.

Methods approach, each plan will describe at least one assessment method. Assessment organisations may then choose a further assessment form mandatory knowledge and skills statements. Sampling will be used to reduce the risk of teaching to the test.

Skills England producing a new third document, one place for critical information across all of the plans.

An update on the pilots, five pilots over the summer, selected for different characteristics and complexity. Three new plans published in draft. The other two are undergoing further work. DFE have produced an accompanying advisory document as an interim summary.

Next steps on implementation. Full scale roll out to follow for all apprenticeships. All plans have been split into three time streams to be revised across next year. Standards in the first group will be highlighted shortly. Initial draft plan with lessons from the pilots to drive an involving process with the expert pools including award organisations, training providers and other relevant groups. Each standard to go through three stage process. Emerging skills will be merged into new standards.

Apprentices marked in the first tranche for revision should hear before Christmas and likely before December.

Apprenticeships already under revision (Express delivery operative) will be looked at on a case by case basis.

Skills England about to contact people relevant to be in the expert pool who will oversee this work.