Why are we shouting about our QAR? Well, for those familiar with the world of apprenticeships, you will know a couple of things. As apprenticeship training providers, we live and die by two things: our Ofsted rating and our ESFA stats. Ofsted is an unpredictable thing; inspections happen without warning. However, our ESFA stats are an annual thing, and they link to the academic year, which starts in August and ends in July. We then get a couple of months to sort out our data before everything gets locked down.
That lockdown has now happened. There are two stats that we are particularly interested in: our Quality Achievement Rate (QAR) and our pass rate. The QAR is basically a calculation of achievers divided by all leaving learners. All apprenticeship training providers have been set the target of a QAR of 67%, a tall order given that the national average is in the low 50s. I am super pleased to say, and genuinely humbled by the effort this has taken, that for the first time ever we have not only smashed the national average but beaten the 68% target and come in with a QAR of 70.6%. At the moment, this our estimate (the confirmed stats, for reasons that are unclear to most of us, are not released until April), but we have been pretty accurate historically – within 0.1%.
Achieving this result has been a really hard task. Two years ago, reeling from the effects of the pandemic, our QAR had slumped to 16%. To get it to where it is today is an immense achievement by the epic AC Training team. The cherry on top is a predicted pass rate of 98.4%!
So, this little post is a bit of bragging and some huge thanks to the amazing AC Training team, whose dedication and hard work have got us here. Go Team! Now bring on Ofsted (but not next week because I’m on holiday….!).