Data Technician assessment plan: Evolution, not (yet) revolution

September 25 Edition

The new Data Technician assessment plan V1.1 landed recently, and to the surprise of many of us, it’s still an end-point assessment. It's reform happening iteratively, while we're waiting for the bigger policy picture to emerge.

The main changes are:

• Greater emphasis on emerging technologies (AI, IoT, generative AI), including prompt engineering as a relevant skill

• Increased focus on ethical considerations and sustainability

• More attention to diversity, equity and inclusion

• Streamlined assessment requirements

• More flexibility in some areas – fewer questions, fewer portfolio items

• Explicit mapping between assessment methods and knowledge, skills and behaviours

We would think these were all positive changes if the plan was intended to be a simple revision to the first version, after all, these changes were actually approved by the Trailblazer Group many months ago. But, we were expecting far more impactful updates in line with apprenticeship assessment reforms.

And here's the real issue: this plan is already being revised again. The broader apprenticeship assessment reforms are coming, and Data Technician V1.1 will need to align with new requirements around centre marking and on-programme assessment. So, we're asking providers and apprentices to adapt to changes that we already know are temporary. And they may be more temporary than we think; the deadline provided for revising the assessment plan to align with reforms is this month, although we don’t yet know when the launch of V1.2 (or V2.0) will be. Assuming it will be within the next couple of months, we will have three versions of an assessment plan running at the same time, for potentially quite a long time. I’m not sure this represents quite the right type of ‘flexibility’ government refers to in its apprenticeship assessment reform rhetoric.

It’s this flexibility thing that really concerns me, not just in relation to Data Technician, but all revised apprenticeship assessment plans. Deliberately shorter on detail, they will be open to more interpretation by individual assessment organisations: a good thing. But if there’s too little detail, assessment orgs – and providers – will want to defer to a level of safety, and there’s safety in what you know, meaning we will defer back to previous methods. Creating a space for innovation and creativity requires barricading that space with clarity and purpose. Less information doesn’t have to mean less clarity.

For DT – and all other assessment plans – Skills England need to focus more on clarity and less on flexibility; the former facilitates the latter.

If you’re interested in watching our webinar on the new Data Technician assessment plan, where we try to bring some of that clarity, you can catch up here.