Your Progress
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Health and Safety
Your practice should be ethical. Do not expose yourself, learners, staff and yourself to any unnecessary risks. For example insisting for assessments to be carried out in a risky environment.
As a quality assurer, you have to ensure any place of learning is safe and conducive to learning. You can imagine unheated classrooms during winter. Imagine classrooms with untested electrical equipment and exposed cables. This is just asking for trouble.
You have to ensure you carry out risk assessments to ensure the environment is safe in line with the Health and Safety Act 1974. You might be expected to report any injuries to your learners, customers and staff especially if this occurs at your premises in line with the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995 (RIDDOR).
It is also worthwhile considering other legislation that protects and safeguards learners such as the also Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 which established the legal basis for the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) and the Disclosure and Barring Service. Depending on your setting, the green paper “Every Child Matters’ might apply. The green paper stresses the importance of information sharing between agencies and promotes a framework of services, which will support every child. Also depending on the organisation you work the Education Act 2011 might apply helping teachers maintain good discipline, using resources fairly and freedoms for schools and colleges.
Confidentiality
As a quality assurer, it is essential you maintain confidentiality in line with your organisation registration with the Information Commissioners Office and the Data Protection Act 1998. Staff and Learner’s personal information should be protected and not shared with anyone who is not authorised. This can be done by locking away the information, ensuring there a secure password on all the gadgets you use to access confidential information.
Also make sure you have a password on any memory sticks you have just in case this gets lost. You will be expected to encourage your assessors to also maintain confidentiality and not include any sensitive information as part of assessments. It is important to ensure your records are accurate and appropriate. Your staff, customers and learners have a right to access their information. It is also worthwhile to bear in mind that if you work for any public body the Freedom of Information Act 2000 gives members of public the right to request information which might be considered in the public interest such as the number of staff. The consequences of not respecting confidentiality could be very severe. You need to consider this from a number of some perspectives.
Learners could lose confidence in your organisation if you break confidentiality which could result in bad reputation. Think of the recent negative press regarding big companies such as TalkTalk and Tesco when their services were hacked.
You could also be sued and fined by the Information Commissioner. They famously fined Google for collecting information without the owners permission. You, therefore, need to ensure you are not asking any information that is not relevant to their enrolment such as wanting to know if a learner is in a relationship or any other inappropriate personal information.
If you are in the United Kingdom and involved in the employment of assessors you are not allowed to ask about any medical condition, age and any information that could disadvantage the candidate before offering them employment.
Awarding bodies and other regulators could also sanction your organisation for confidentiality which might result in loss of contracts. You, therefore, need to embrace the importance of maintaining confidentiality and data protection.
