Submitting the Approval Form
Guidance on completion of your formal application
Once the initial enquiry form has been approved, you will be sent a formal application form. When considering a submission for initial approval to provide one or more of our programmes, you should consider the following points.
Course tutor
Your course tutor should preferably be a member of our institute and have adequate spare time to promote our courses, offer tutorial support to the students, manage the organisation of the course team and maintain statistics and records on file for appraisal at annual approval visits. They should indicate a commitment to support our aims and objectives.
Course team
Availability of at least two purchasing specialists with recent practitioner experience is essential to the delivery of the specialist purchasing subjects in all programmes. It is highly desirable that your staff are also graduates of our Graduate Diploma programme and current members. Where this is not the case, we encourage you to develop such qualifications.
For the remaining subjects, it is essential that your tutors have good experience of teaching their subject at level 3 (Certificate) and level 4 (Graduate Diploma) and that they have or are studying for appropriate teaching qualifications. CVs are required for all of your teaching staff, and your senior management should indicate full support for the intended provision.
Market testing and promotion
Clear indications should be given that you have carried out research into the local need for the course, together with an estimate of the potential student strength from the outset. Details of course promotion initiatives and available budgets are also required. These should include a commitment to maintain up-to-date course information leaflets, to post full details of the courses on your website and to foster relations with relevant employers and our local branches.
Enrolment
Many potential students hold high pressure jobs and it can be important to provide streamlined enrolment solutions. The submission should include details of how your college deals with the process from initial contact by the students to their arrival at the start of the course; postal or evening enrolments are preferable.
We expect students to be given early advice to contact us as soon as possible to ensure that possible exemptions are addressed and registrations for examinations completed.
Your submission should provide details of relevant contact personnel, along with telephone and facsimile numbers and e-mail addresses. Teaching staff can be difficult to contact, therefore suitably knowledgeable administration staff make ideal contacts.
Your course tutor should be responsible for co-ordinating enrolment procedures and for maintaining recruitment records for future audit purposes.
Induction
Your course tutor should be responsible for issuing course handbooks when none have been issued in advance. The briefing should include the information in the sample course handbook which we provide in your information pack.
Course delivery
Plans should be submitted to indicate your methods of delivery, and outline timetables should be provided, together with planned class contact times. The submission should include your college's policy on maximum and minimum class sizes and contingency measures for dealing with class sizes less than break-even. Such measures could include the adoption of flexible learning and should reflect the support allotted, in terms of workshops and self-study material. Finally, details should be given of your procedures for conducting examinations and the standards of your examination centres.
Examinations
Our national examinations are held in May and November, with deadlines for examination enrolment some two months before these dates. There is an extensive network of examination centres for student members and, to ensure that uniform standards and facilities are met, you are required to apply for formal approval to our Membership Operations Manager.
Results are available eight to ten weeks after the examinations, and you can download past papers and examiners’ reports from this website. Examiners will provide further analysis of individual papers for a set fee. Specially set papers are available to allow examinations to be held at flexible dates but this option is only available to colleges with a proven track record. Costs associated with this process can be obtained on request.
Work Based Assessment
From 2007 Work Based Assessment (WBA) will be available for the integrative units of CIPS qualifications in the form of an assignment at Level 3 Certificate, Level 4 Foundation Diploma and Level 5 Advanced Diploma and work-based project at Level 6 Graduate Diploma.
In order to be able to offer this method of assessment to your students, centres must be able to prove that they have lecturers on the teaching team with the relevant Assessor and Verifier units - A1, A2 and V1. In addition, a centre representative must attend a WBA workshop run by us prior to offering students the opportunity of offering WBA.
Quality assurance
Your submission should include details of how your quality assurance process is reflected in part-time courses. This should include information on course team reviews and indicate your policy on attendance at review meetings. The policy should require attendance by part-time staff and student representatives; it should also state the need for formal minutes to be taken. Where shortcomings are highlighted, action plans should be raised and these should indicate allocation of responsibility and set deadlines.
Details of how student feedback is elicited are needed, along with your process by which student feedback is addressed, and how their individual concerns and complaints are progressed. We also need details on the mentoring and initial assessments of new full- time and part-time staff, available development programmes and your staff appraisal system. It is expected that course handbooks will be issued and these should include the information set out in our sample handbook.
Financial
You should give some indication of your financial status (for example, Category 'A', 'B' or 'C' where relevant), along with projected course costs and whether these would be full cost or subsidised by funding. Details are needed of whether books and/or examination fees are included and how your costs are calculated.
It would be helpful to know at which level your budgets are held, and the process for funding the purchase of training resources, such as books, study guides and equipment for the production of handouts and slides. You are expected to have at least one set of the official study guides and associated texts for each module delivered in your library. Finally, information should be provided about the resources available to recruit part-time specialist staff.
Partnership
Evidence should be included of your commitment to helping us promote the purchasing and supply profession. This may include our members among your teaching staff, links with our local branches and encouragement of student participation in branch activities.
You should also indicate a commitment to releasing relevant staff to attend our annual tutor workshops. These are essential opportunities to meet examiners, keep up to date with syllabus changes and network with other tutors. Workshops are normally held in June, and the three venues are published by January each year giving you a choice of venue.
Documentation
The name of your course manager responsible for organising our programmes and the names of members of the course team(s) should be included, together with their curricula vitae.
It is particularly important that staff with current or recent purchasing experience teach the specialist purchasing topics, and full details of their experience should be given. A diagram showing the management structure would be helpful. Descriptions of the classrooms allocated to the programme and of your learning resource centre should be included and a commitment given to stock your library with the relevant texts and study guides.
Following receipt of a favourable submission, our External Resources Manager will arrange to visit you within three months of the start of the first course to assess your progress. A report on the visit and an approval certificate where appropriate will be issued within four weeks following this visit. Further visits will be made at 12 to 18 month intervals to assess suitability for continued approval or upgrading to higher categories of approval.
