City & Guilds, the charitable business and renowned royal charter organisation for skills, has today confirmed its use of digital authoring programme, GradeMaker Pro, for the next three years.
City & Guilds initially used GradeMaker Pro for a nine-month pilot to trial the platform and investigate how it could help improve the business’s existing assessment production process.
Clear criteria for the success of the pilot were established, and these objectives were regularly reviewed to ensure that evidence to support an effective evaluation was being collected at all stages. A wide range of qualifications was subsequently selected for inclusion in the pilot to ensure a full range of assessment characteristics, item types and question styles.
Following the successful completion of the pilot, City & Guilds will be transitioning the production of the vast majority of their paper-based assessments to GradeMaker Pro over the next three years, while investigating the potential to extend use of the platform for the production of both non-examined and computer-based assessments.
City & Guilds have announced they are confident that GradeMaker Pro will help them to make significant improvements to their content quality assurance processes, increase security and auditability throughout the assessment production process and provide their staff and external associates with a simple, efficient and intuitive system for them to work with.
Mark Bedlow, Chief Operating Officer at AQA, said:
“We are delighted that City & Guilds has decided to extend its relationship with GradeMaker. It is our mission to provide the best possible tools to support the exam authoring process and it has been very encouraging to see how the team at City & Guilds have been able to use the GradeMaker technology. We look forward to supporting City & Guilds further as they continue to expand and evolve on their digital journey.”
Cecilia Harvey, Chief Operating Officer at City & Guilds, said:
“Producing high quality, error-free assessments is a critical capability for all Awarding Organisations. At City & Guilds, we believe that adopting new software and keeping up to date with the latest developments in new technology will make us even more efficient and ensure we maintain the quality and accuracy of the 800-plus assessments that we produce each year.”
About City & Guilds
As the royal charter organisation for skills, we are proud that for almost 150 years we have collaborated with people, organisations, and economies to help them identify and develop the skills they need to thrive. We understand the life changing link between skills development, social mobility, prosperity, and success so everything we do focuses on developing and delivering high-quality training, qualifications and credentials that lead to jobs and meet the changing needs of industry.
We partner with our customers to deliver work-based learning programmes that build competency to support better prospects for people, organisations, and wider society. We create flexible learning pathways that support lifelong employability, because we believe that people deserve the opportunity to (re)train and (re)learn again and again – gaining new skills at every stage of life, regardless of where they start.
Our City & Guilds Foundation activities amplify our purpose by helping to remove barriers to getting into a job, celebrating best practice on the job, and advocating for jobs of the future.
The Princess Royal Training Awards recognise employers who invest in the skills of their people and can evidence the impact it has. The Awards recognise the achievement of a standard of excellence and are open to all employers in the UK and Ireland.
The City & Guilds community of brands includes Gen2, ILM, Intertrain, Kineo and The Oxford Group.
About Grademaker Pro
GradeMaker Pro is a purpose-built digital authoring platform that is used to successfully manage production of high stakes paper-based assessments by many large awarding bodies, both in the UK and Internationally. The application provides a secure environment where all stages of the assessment production process, from first draft to print, can be fully managed. Within the platform, awarding bodies can strictly control who has access to content at each step of the development process.