Educationwise Wins Quality Team of the Year at the Quality Professionals Awards 2026

On Friday evening at the Quality Professionals Awards for Further Education and Employability, Educationwise was named Quality Team of the Year in the Independent and Adult and Community Learning Providers category. It is an award we are incredibly proud of and one that means a great deal to every person who contributed to earning it.

The Quality Professionals Awards exist to recognise the individuals and teams across the further education and skills sector who hold the standards that learner outcomes depend on. These are not always headline-grabbing roles. Quality assurance in further education is detailed, consistent and often invisible to everyone except the learners whose progress relies on it being done well, and being named Quality Team of the Year in a category that includes some of the most respected independent providers in the country is a recognition we do not take lightly.

At Educationwise, quality is not something that happens at the end of a programme or gets reviewed at the end of the year. It is embedded into how we deliver from day one, across every programme and for every learner. Our model is built around early intervention and live oversight rather than end of term reviews. From the moment a qualification is approved through to the point a learner is certified, structured quality assurance applies at every stage of the journey, including risk-based internal quality assurance sampling, unannounced tutor observations, fortnightly improvement reviews and learner voice that feeds directly into how we develop and refine our delivery. Tutor development is linked directly to quality findings rather than being treated as a separate function, and when something could be done better the response is immediate and practical rather than added to a list for a future review cycle.

We also invest in making sure our quality processes produce information that is actually useful in real time. Live data tracking and weekly data reviews mean that issues are identified and resolved before they affect learner outcomes rather than being discovered retrospectively. There should never be a point at which something has gone unnoticed for long enough to matter and our systems are built around making sure that does not happen.

The further education and skills sector asks a great deal of the people who come into it. Apprentices are managing the demands of full time employment alongside a qualification programme. Learners on commercial courses are fitting study around jobs, families and everything else that makes up a real adult life. The quality of the support, delivery and oversight they receive during that time has a direct impact on whether they succeed, and poor quality in further education does not just produce lower achievement rates. It produces learners who disengage, who lose confidence in their own ability and who carry the experience of a programme that did not meet its promises into everything that follows. Good quality produces something very different. It produces learners who feel genuinely supported, whose knowledge and skills have developed in ways they can apply immediately and who finish their programme with more confidence than they started it with. That is what our quality team makes possible every day and it is what this award is recognising.

This recognition sits alongside a number of others that reflect the same commitment across the whole of Educationwise. We are an Ofsted Outstanding provider, rated at the highest possible level by the independent body responsible for inspecting education and training in England. We were named winners of the Excellence in English and Maths Skills Development award at the Apprenticeship and Training Awards 2026. And at QPA26 we were finalists in three categories, with nominations for Quality Improvement Leader of the Year and Quality Champion of the Year alongside the Quality Team award that we went on to win. Together these recognitions tell a consistent story about an organisation that takes quality seriously at every level, not just in the teams dedicated to it but in how we think about delivery, development and learner experience across everything we do.

For employers who partner with us to develop their teams, this award is an independent confirmation of something we hope they have already experienced directly. The quality of what we deliver is not incidental to our offer. It is the foundation of it. For learners considering a programme with Educationwise, it is a signal that the qualification you work toward will be delivered, supported and quality assured to a standard that has been recognised at a national level by the people who set the benchmark for the further education sector.

We are proud of what this award represents and we are proud of the team who earned it. Quality Team of the Year at the Quality Professionals Awards for Further Education and Employability 2026.