UK qualification glossary

The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation, the government regulator of qualifications, examinations and assessments in England. Ofqual does not award qualifications itself. It recognises awarding organisations, sets the conditions they must meet, and keeps the public register of every regulated qualification. If a qualification is on that register it is regulated; if it is not, it is not, whatever the brochure says. Our qualification checker sends you straight to the register entry for any number you paste in.

The reference every regulated qualification carries on the Ofqual register, written as three digits, four digits and a final character, for example 603/7619/3. It is also called a Qualification Accreditation Number, a QAN, or an RQF number. The number identifies the qualification, not the learner, so it is the same for everyone who takes it. Every qualification we deliver shows its number on its page, and how to check a qualification is real explains what to do with it.

A qualification that an Ofqual-recognised awarding organisation has had accepted onto the Regulated Qualifications Framework. It has a qualification number, a level, a size, and published conditions for how it is assessed and quality assured. A regulated qualification means the same thing to every employer, college and university in the country. Anything without a number is a course, not a qualification, however well taught.

The framework Ofqual uses to describe every regulated qualification in England by two measures: its level, which says how demanding it is, and its size, which says how long it takes. It replaced the earlier Qualifications and Credit Framework in 2015. Levels run from Entry Level, in three sub-levels, up to Level 8. Size is stated in total qualification time and guided learning hours, both defined below.

The level tells you how difficult a qualification is, not how long it takes. As a rough guide: Entry Level and Level 1 sit below GCSE; Level 2 is GCSE standard at grades 4 to 9; Level 3 is A level standard; Level 4 is the first year of a degree or an HNC; Level 5 is the second year, an HND or a foundation degree; Level 6 is a bachelor's degree; Level 7 a master's; Level 8 a doctorate. This centre delivers from Entry Level 3 to Level 5. The catalogue can be filtered by level.

Three words for the size of a qualification, fixed by the RQF. An Award is the smallest, up to 120 hours of total qualification time. A Certificate runs from 121 to 369 hours. A Diploma is 370 hours or more. The words say nothing about level: a Level 3 Award and a Level 3 Diploma are equally demanding, one is simply much larger. Our Level 3 Award in Education and Training is 120 hours; the Level 3 Diploma in Skills for Business: Human Resources is 900.

An awarding organisation recognised by Ofqual, and the one that awards every qualification this centre delivers. NCFE writes the qualification specifications, approves the centres that deliver them, quality assures their assessment decisions, and issues the certificates. Its CACHE brand covers care and education qualifications, which is why some of our titles read CACHE and some NCFE. Both are the same regulated organisation.

The body that owns a qualification and puts its name on the certificate. Awarding organisations are recognised by Ofqual and held to its conditions. They do not usually teach; they approve centres to do that, and they check the centres' work. When you finish a qualification with us, the certificate is issued by NCFE, not by the school, which is exactly how it should be.

An organisation an awarding organisation has approved to deliver and assess its qualifications. Approval means the centre's staff, systems, policies and resources have been inspected and found to meet the awarding organisation's conditions, and the centre is then quality assured on an ongoing basis. The Data and AI School of London is an NCFE approved centre. A centre is not an awarding organisation and cannot award anything in its own name.

A Level 4 or Level 5 qualification that has been approved against an employer-led occupational standard by the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, whose work passed to Skills England in 2025. The approval means the content is what employers in that occupation have said they need. HTQs sit at the same level as the first two years of a degree and are studied by people going straight into a technical role. We deliver HTQs in data analysis, cyber security, data engineering and cloud and networking; what is an HTQ goes into the detail.

The phrase NCFE puts in the title of Level 3 qualifications built directly from an occupational standard, so that the content is what an employer of that role expects a new entrant to know and do. Our Level 3 diplomas in data, cyber security and digital support carry it. The word "entry" refers to entering the occupation, not to the qualification's difficulty: these are full Level 3 diplomas.

The hours a learner spends being taught or supervised: lessons, tutorials, marked activity, and assessment under supervision. It is one of the two size measures on every qualification page. On a self-paced course the number is a guide to how much taught material there is, not a timetable, and nobody stands over you with a stopwatch. A qualification with 48 guided learning hours has about that much teaching content in it.

The awarding organisation's estimate of the total hours a typical learner needs to complete the qualification, counting the guided learning hours and everything else: reading, practice, preparing evidence, writing up. It always exceeds the guided learning hours, usually by a good margin. It is an estimate, not a requirement, and it is the figure that decides whether a qualification is an Award, a Certificate or a Diploma.

Assessment by a body of evidence built up over the course, marked against the published assessment criteria, rather than by a timed examination. Evidence can be written work, reports, screenshots of practical tasks, designs, code, recordings or witness statements. Most of our qualifications are assessed this way; Functional Skills are the exception. How assessment works and portfolio assessment explained cover what that means day to day.

The two layers of checking behind every result. Internal quality assurance is the centre checking its own assessors: a qualified internal quality assurer samples marked work to confirm the decisions are accurate and consistent. External quality assurance is the awarding organisation checking the centre: an NCFE external quality assurer reviews the centre's assessment and its records before certificates are released. At this centre every assessment decision is internally quality assured before a grade reaches the learner.

The grades a graded qualification can award. Most of our qualifications are not graded: each unit is either achieved or not yet achieved, and the certificate records a pass. Where a qualification is graded, the grades build up, so every pass criterion must be met before merit is considered and every merit criterion before distinction. "Not yet achieved" is the phrase used instead of "fail" because a learner can resubmit. Each course page says which applies.

The regulated qualifications in English and mathematics that run from Entry Level 1 to Level 2, recognised across employment and further study and, at Level 2, accepted in place of a GCSE grade 4 by most employers and apprenticeship providers. Unlike our other qualifications they include externally set assessments taken under invigilated conditions, which we arrange. See Functional Skills courses.

A ten-digit number that identifies one learner across every regulated qualification they take in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is issued by the Learning Records Service, run by the Department for Education, and it is the key to the Personal Learning Record that holds a learner's achievements. If you have studied in the UK since 2008 you almost certainly have one. If you do not, the centre can obtain one for you at registration; it is not a barrier to enrolling.

The points system universities use to compare Level 3 qualifications when they make offers. A qualification carries points only if UCAS has published a row for it in the Tariff tables; many perfectly good Level 3 qualifications, including most vocational diplomas, carry none, and that says nothing about their value to an employer. Some of our Level 3 qualifications carry points and some do not, and each course page states which. Whether a university accepts any qualification is always that university's decision.

A document a training provider issues in its own name to say you finished its course. It is not a qualification. It has no qualification number, no level on the RQF, no awarding organisation and no external quality assurance, and an employer has no way to compare it with anything. Many online courses sell one. The difference is easy to check: a qualification has a number on the Ofqual register and a certificate of completion does not.

Changes to how an assessment is taken, not to what it measures, so that a learner with a disability, a health condition or a specific learning difficulty is assessed on what they know. Extra time, a screen reader, alternative formats and a scribe are typical examples. The duty applies from your first contact with the centre, before you enrol. Our reasonable adjustments page explains who can ask and how.

A course with no timetable, no cohort and no submission deadlines. You start on any working day, work through the material at whatever pace suits you, and submit each assessment when it is ready. Tutor support is there throughout. Nearly every qualification we deliver is self-paced; the exception is any component that genuinely needs a group, such as Functional Skills English speaking and listening, which runs as a scheduled cohort. See self-paced courses.