Why Setas make use of assessors and moderators for quality assurance

By Ivor Blumenthal - CEO: Services SETA
As Vocational "Education and Training Quality Assurance Bodies' (ETQA?s) it is crucial that Setas are able to qualitatively and quantitatively account for the integrity and activities of our accredited Training Providers. At the heart of auditing for this objective lies the activities of "constituent' Assessors and Moderators, the true soldiers for skills development in this country.
Becoming a Training Provider is not easy as the standards which are required to be met do not really distinguish between large and small providers for one very good reason. It is critical to protect the interests of the public at large in a preferential way to the interests of the Training Provider, irrespective of size.
At the very heart of the criteria of success as a Training Provider lies the requirement of a unit-standards referenced accreditation process, designed to attest to the fact and assure the public that an "accredited' Provider is offering a training programme which has been measured against the standards determined by Industry itself as a requirement for competency certification.
This means that Training Programmes are expected to meet the target markets requirements instead of the historical view that a target market gets what a Training Provider is capable of delivering.
ETQA?s use Assessors and Moderators who have been formally trained by accredited Training Providers (accredited by the Education Training Development Practitioners (ETDP) Seta) and in-turn expect those Assessors and Moderators to register with respective client-ETQA?s as "constituent' Assessors and Moderators.
In a nutshell this means that the ETDP Seta register applicants as Assessors and Moderators where they can show that they have been trained to an acceptable standard. They can show this by producing a Portfolio of Evidence containing proof that they have practiced under supervision as either an Assessor or Moderator for a period of time and have completed the required number of assessments or moderation activities.
While this is the first step in their own process of becoming registered, the South African Qualifications Authority demands that before they can be used by any of the respective Seta ETQA?s they are first required to prove that they have not only acted as a Assessors and Moderators, but more critically have done so using the particular unit standards which belong to that particular Seta ETQA i.e. that they have worked within the Setas constituency of members and therefore are capable of becoming a "constituency' Assessor.
An Assessor works either within a particular internal training division of a company or for a private or public Training Provider offering public programmes. Their task is to assess competency on both an interim and final summative basis against the unit standards registered on the National Qualifications Framework.
Their principle task is to gather evidence of competency (in whatever way possible) to show that a candidate is competent against a standard. A particular group of Assessors are also trained to be competent in the development of Assessments and Assessment materials.
There is a school-of-thought which believes that a good Assessor should not be restricted to any particular constituency and should be able to apply their expertise amongst various Seta constituencies because of the professional application of Assessors and Moderators processes.
This however is open to abuse and hence the "constituency' registration requirement from SAQA. It is far easier to hold a "constituent' assessor accountable to a "constituent' ETQA than a generic one which could be considered so generic as to be homeless. Equally, within the Services Sector we recognise different levels of Assessors, with the entry-level Assessor being regarded as an evidence gatherer who works under the supervision of a fully-qualified Assessor.
Within the Services Seta, evidence gatherers generally operate at NQF 1 and 2 levels which do not require Formal Summative Assessment processes but generally accept a desk-based assessment process.
Just like Assessors, so Moderators too are required to register with a Vocational ETQA as "constituent' Moderators.
Within the Services Sector a Moderator is someone who is responsible for quality assuring both the aspect of provision as well as that of assessment. Generally moderators perform two sets of services and some more highly qualified ones a third, namely Learning Programme evaluation.
The two standard, primary sets of competencies of a Moderator are firstly the ability to "monitor' i.e. examine through a site-visit a Provider Institution and the ETDP Qualities of Trainers and Facilitators. The second set relate to quality auditing of actual activities within Learning Programmes culminating in an audit of the assessment process itself.
The third, more rarefied competency of a highly select group of moderators is the capacity to evaluate Learning Programmes for Accreditation. These Moderators are used as Evaluators by Setas during the process whereby Training Providers apply for accreditation of their respective Learning Programmes.
The essential skill which a Moderator must possess when carrying out this function is a sufficient understanding of the NQF to be able to examine the referencing of what is contained within a Learning Programme to what exists as unit standards on the National Qualifications Framework.
The Services Seta expects every Training Provider we accredit to use "internal' moderators which permanently monitor and self-moderate and submit reports independently of influence to our ETQA. We in-turn use external moderators in a variety of way including Learning Programme Evaluation and site-visit monitoring and moderation of all applicant Providers as well as twice a year for the monitoring and moderation of accredited provider activities.
Assessors and Moderators are the soldiers, the backbone of our ETQA Quality Assurance service to our members. Without them we would not be able to function as an ETQA.