Regulating national assessments

We intend to keep many elements of the existing framework. We propose to continue to focus our regulatory activity on areas of greatest risk and to use validity as our primary criterion for considering assessment quality. We propose to continue to regulate in accordance with the principles of good regulation.

The main changes we are proposing to the framework are:

• to bring the framework up-to-date by reflecting changes to the bodies responsible for developing and delivering national assessments
• to provide greater transparency and clarity about how we regulate, including by introducing a section explaining in more detail our regulatory approach, regulatory tools and our focus on the validity of national assessments
• making sure our expectations of responsible bodies focus on outcomes such as validity, rather than prescribing certain administrative approaches
• to make more explicit our expectations relating to assessment purpose and to strengthen our expectations about risks that should be escalated to us by responsible bodies