Guidance

PTQ Outcomes: Modified Paper Requests

Updated 4 August 2023

Applies to England

Introduction

In order to fulfil our regulatory and accreditation functions as set out in the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009, we require awarding organisations to provide exams delivery data for regulated qualifications.

What data will be collected?

Data should relate only to vocational and technical qualifications (VTQs) that are included in the Department for Education’s performance tables (PTQs) for the academic year being submitted. More specifically, these are: Technical Awards, Applied Generals, Technical Certificates and Technical Levels.

When will data be collected?

Data will be collected according to the reporting schedule which is agreed and maintained by Ofqual’s data services team.

Updates to formats and guidance

This guidance document will be updated regularly. Any changes to procedure will be incorporated into the guidance document.

How to submit your data

Your data should be submitted to us in CSV format. Please refer to the ‘Connecting to Ofqual’s data portal and uploading data’ document on our webpage to help you submit your files to us. If you need to ask us about a data submission please do contact the Data Services team by emailing [email protected], please do not send your data files via email to Data Services or to any other Ofqual email address, or via Contact the Regulator in the Portal.

Uploaded data

Once files have been successfully uploaded, the data will be validated against a set of validation rules. These are detailed in the sections below. If validation is successful, the data is automatically transferred into our systems and you will receive email confirmation. If the file is unsuccessful at any stage of validation you will receive an email with details of the validation failure. Please correct your file and resubmit it.

Amendments to data

Ofqual staff will not alter data once it has been submitted. If you find an error or omission after you’ve had a successful upload, please notify us by emailing [email protected]. We need to reject the existing submission before you can upload a new file.

How your data will be used

This data will be used to undertake our regulatory activities and, where required, to produce Official Statistics to fulfil our responsibility as a government department.

General completion guidelines

• This template is designed to capture data on requests for modified papers made during the academic year. It only applies to cases where requests for modified papers are made by the centre to the AO for written/paper-based tasks.

• For online tests, internal assessment, and where centres are not required to submit requests to the AO for modified papers, a nil return can be submitted.

• Rows for assessments only need to be included where modified papers have been requested. For assessments with no modified paper requests, there is no need to submit rows of data (i.e., rows of only zeros).

• The AssessmentCode in this template is cross validated against AssessmentCode received in the Assessment Reference Information template.

File format

The file must be CSV format and the first row must be headers as displayed in the ‘Name’ column of the table below. The subsequent rows must have the values of the data to be reported which must match the format and validation rules below.

Name	Description	Position	Validation Regular Expression	Description of Regular Expression
ReportingDate	Date the file was due to be submitted to Ofqual regardless of when it was actually uploaded (this date will be made available by Ofqual).	1	^(20)\d\d[- ](0[1- 9]\|1[012])[- ](0[1-9]|[12][0- 9]|3[01])$	The date in the following format: year (4 digits), a dash, month (2 digits), a dash, day (2 digits)
AcademicYear	The academic year which this data submission relates to (defined as 1 September to 31 August). For example, “2021- 2022”.	2	^(20)\d\d[- ](20)\d\d $	The academic year in the following format: start year (4 digits), a dash, end year (4 digits) Format accepted yyyyyyyy
AwardingOrganisation	Name of the awarding organisation	3	^.{1,100}$	1 to 100 characters accepted
AssessmentCode	Unique identifier for the assessment, generated by the AO. Should match the codes given in the Assessment Reference Information template.	4	^.{1,50}$	1 to 50 characters accepted
TotalModifiedPaperRequests	Total number of modified paper requests received by the awarding organisation, regardless of whether they were granted	5	^\d{1,4}$	1 to 4 digits accepted
TotalCandidatesGrantedModifiedPapers	Total number of unique candidates granted modified papers	6	^\d{1,4}$	1 to 4 digits accepted
BraillePapersAndBrailleLabels	Number of Braille question papers and tactile diagrams with Braille labels granted	7	^\d{1,4}$	1 to 4 digits accepted
Modified18PointBoldPapers	Number of Modified 18-point bold papers granted	8	^\d{1,4}$	1 to 4 digits accepted
Modified24PointBoldPapers	Number of Modified 24-point bold papers granted	9	^\d{1,4}$	1 to 4 digits accepted
ModifiedLanguagePapers	Number of modified language papers granted	10	^\d{1,4}$	1 to 4 digits accepted
TactileDiagramsWithPrintLabels	Number of Tactile Diagrams with print labels granted	11	^\d{1,4}$	1 to 4 digits accepted
TranscriptsOfListeningTestOrVideo	Number of Transcripts of listening test/video granted	12	^\d{1,4}$	1 to 4 digits accepted
NoninteractiveElectronicQPs	Number of Non-interactive electronic question papers granted	13	^\d{1,4}$	1 to 4 digits accepted
OtherFormats	Number of other formats granted	14	^\d{1,4}$	1 to 4 digits accepted
TotalDiscreteModifiedPapers	Total number of discrete modified papers produced. Example: If five Braille papers and five A4 18-point bold papers were produced, for the same maths question paper, this would count as two discrete modified papers. If there were two maths papers (paper A & B) this would count as four discrete modified papers.	15	^\d{1,3}$	1 to 3 digits accepted

Contacts

For all queries relating to the data collection process, amendments to data previously provided, or for general guidance. please contact:

Data services

Ofqual
2nd floor, 1 Friargate
Station Square
Coventry
CV1 2GN

Email [email protected]