Four assessment organisations, four ways of doing it
Your provision works with several end-point assessment organisations, because different standards and different employers need different ones. One has a portal where you register learners and request dates. Another takes a spreadsheet by email. A third confirms dates in a PDF attached to a reply. The fourth changes assessor at short notice and tells you by phone.
Your EPA coordinator keeps a spreadsheet of who is booked for what, but each learner has several components: a knowledge test, an observation, a professional discussion, maybe a project presentation. Each component has its own date, venue or video link, and assessor. When a learner phones to ask when their professional discussion is, the coordinator searches three inboxes and a portal before answering.
Why a spreadsheet cannot keep up
- Confirmations arrive in different formats, and someone copies each one in by hand.
- A reschedule from the assessment organisation updates their portal but not your spreadsheet.
- Learners and employers are told dates by the coach, the coordinator or the assessment organisation directly, so nobody knows what each person has been told.
- Results and grades arrive separately, sometimes weeks later, and are entered wherever someone remembers.
- When the coordinator is off, nobody else can find anything.
When a date slips through
A missed assessment is expensive for everyone. The learner prepared for a date that nobody reminded them about, the employer had not released them, and the rebooking may push their completion back. Your relationship with the assessment organisation suffers too, since they had an assessor booked.
Smaller slips add up. Employers ask the same question several times because they were never sent the date. Coaches do not know which learners are about to be assessed, so their preparation sessions happen too late. Results sit in an inbox, and the learner's completion is not recorded, so the rest of the completion admin waits as well.
One tracker for every assessment
What we build is a single record of every learner's end-point assessment, whichever organisation runs it.
- Each learner at gateway gets an EPA record with the components their standard requires, taken from a template per standard.
- Confirmations and reschedules arriving by email are read automatically; dates, times, venues and assessor names are extracted and put in front of the coordinator to confirm with one click.
- Where an assessment organisation offers an API or a regular export, we read it directly instead.
- Once a component is confirmed, the learner, line manager and coach get the details, with a calendar invite and reminders before the day.
- Results and grades are captured the same way when they arrive and recorded against the component.
- When every component has a result, the learner moves to your completion list, and the coordinator sees them there.
| Component | Typical detail stored | Reminders |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge test | Date, time, online or venue, access details | Learner and coach |
| Observation | Date, workplace, assessor | Learner, line manager and coach |
| Professional discussion | Date, video link, assessor | Learner and coach |
| Project or showcase | Submission deadline and presentation date | Learner, line manager and coach |
| Result | Grade, date received, any resit | Coach and coordinator |
Extraction uses a language model such as OpenAI or Anthropic Claude to read the email, and a person confirms each booking before anyone is notified, so a misread date never goes out.
The coordinator's day afterwards
Your coordinator starts the day with a short queue: three new confirmations read from overnight emails, each with the extracted date shown beside the original message. They confirm two and correct one. Invitations go out.
When an employer phones, anyone on the team can find the learner and read out every assessment date. At the end of each month the delivery manager sees how many learners are booked, assessed, awaiting results and completed, without asking anyone.
Is this your EPA admin?
- EPA dates are tracked in a spreadsheet copied from emails and portals.
- Learners or employers have missed an assessment because nobody reminded them.
- Reschedules from assessment organisations are not always picked up.
- Results arrive but completion records are updated late.
- Only one person really knows who is booked for what.