Training Providers

The SETA ETQAs and accredited providers have a critical role to play in the achievement of the NSDS objectives, most notably through striving to ensure that education and training provision and skills development are of a high standard and quality, are appropriately targeted and are relevant to the needs of the economy and society.

Education and training providers include the following:

• Providers whose core business is education and training
• Workplaces whose core business is not education and training, but that offer education and training programmes to staff and/or external learners
• FET institutions
• Assessment centres

The CHIETA defines the different site of delivery and/or assessment as follows:

Assessment Only

You are an assessment-only provider if you are responsible for summative assessments, including Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL). In addition to mentoring and coaching at RPL assessment sites, education and training development practitioners must be able to help the candidate make clear what they know and prepare the candidate for the assessment itself. The CHIETA has developed RPL Process Guidelines and an RPL Implementation Manual that you should refer to.

Delivery and Assessment

You are a delivery and assessment provider if you deliver Chemical Industries Sector learning programmes and also manage the assessment thereof. The CHIETA promotes delivery through a number of sites (e.g. different workplace sites, as well as “institutional” or provider-based sites) to ensure the integration of theory and practice, training, assessment and experimental learning. If you use a number of sites, you are responsible for ensuring quality at those different sites. This means that you need to ensure that quality standards are maintained, no matter where the training is taking place.

As a provider, you will be accountable to the CHIETA for all delivery and assessments conducted, whether they are on-site or off-site arrangements. This also allows you to sub-contract or outsource assessment activities. However, it emphasises that you remain responsible for managing all of these arrangements within the accreditation agreement.

Delivery Only

The CHIETA ETQA does not accredit “delivery-only” providers, i.e. providers that deliver learning programmes but do not formally assess them or contract registered assessors to assess them. The reason for this is that assessment is the main pillar of quality assurance and so where there is no assessment, quality assurance is not possible.

Note: The CHIETA does not require that workplaces that are a site for the workplace component of learning programmes, but are not providers, become accredited. It does, however, encourage workplaces to institute best practices in terms of supporting the learner in this process. Where assessments are done “on-site”, this remains the responsibility of the accredited education and training provider. The accredited provider is responsible to ensure that workplace training is of the required standard.