As you know from previous updates all NEW candidates should be enrolled on the Level 6 Diploma in Sign Language Interpreting and Translation (INTRA6). For those who are enrolled on the INT6 and TRA6 and working towards completing the qualification, we are asking that all portfolios are completed by 31 December 2022.
We would like to draw your attention to this feature of IRIS. If any footage you are trying to upload to IRIS is too large, or there is any other issue with uploading it straight to IRIS, then you can upload it to an external site like Google Drive or YouTube, and simply upload the link to this video to IRIS. Please ensure that you are using the correct privacy settings dependent on which platform you choose:
To request a reasonable adjustment, you must use the ‘Reasonable Adjustment’ section of the booking form, not ‘other requests’. You should then make a public comment on the form as this is what alerts our team that a reasonable adjustment has been requested.
A how-to guide of how to request a RA is available with the documents section of IRIS. If you don’t request a reasonable adjustment using the correct process, your reasonable adjustment may not be processed, and candidates may not get the required adjustment.
We’d like to remind you to continue to add your courses to the Signature Learning Hub, we are seeing a large increase in the number of people looking to learn and searching for our courses. Many of these are using the specific search function, this allows them to search through a specific list including remote or face to face, time of the day the classes are etc.
So please remember to add any courses you have coming up to your centre records and continue to update this to make sure you get the maximum amount of candidates.
For instructions on how to do that please see ‘How to add a course to centre finder’ within documents in your IRIS account or contact our team who will be happy to help with this.
From 1st January 2022, we will process your renewal for you. You will receive advance notification that your renewal will be coming up and given 30 days to contact us to tell us if you do not want to renew.
A reminder that the old Level 3, 4 and 6 qualifications will no longer be available from 31st December 2021, all assessments must be taken before this date for this qualification.
For all 201 assessments that are taken individually through the Signature Learning Hub candidates will receive their results immediately on submission of their answers, these will be transferred across onto IRIS. For 201 assessments taken within a centre, where candidates don’t enter grades into the system these will continue to be marked in a current way.
Following feedback from our centres, we have made developments to show the date results have been entered within IRIS. When in a candidate grading view below the unit grade you will see ‘assessed on’ this will now update every time a result has been updated, this will help to make it clearer for when resit grades have been put in.
We would like to remind all centres to make sure candidates are signing their name and the topic they are covering at the beginning of assessments. This helps our assessors to make sure they are marking the correct candidate’s assessment.
Thank you for taking the time to be part of the centre consultation, the form has now closed.
As a reminder, the centre consultation has been done to measure the feasibility of allowing candidates to book directly onto your courses through the Signature website, so we want to understand if you, as one of our centres would use this, and how you currently manage this process.
Our 2021/2022 fees booklet is now available. Click here to view – it has also been added to the document section of IRIS.
We understand how challenging the last 18 months have been for everyone, we want to help where we can. That is why we have made the decision that Signature will not increase our fees for the next year (21/22).
Some centres have told us that they are not receiving some notifications when waiting for results. From today (2nd August) notifications will be sent to centres every Friday with the results that have been processed over the past week.
These will be sent via our email system, to make sure that you receive these emails please whitelist ‘info@signature-news.org.uk’ with your email provider to make sure these emails come through to your email address. We would also recommend that you make sure the email address in IRIS is correct for your centre administrator as this is where we send notifications.
Level 6 Certificate in British/Irish Sign Language – As you know, 6ASS1, 2 and 3 are internally assessed by you. We want centres to start marking these in IRIS. Your candidates must have completed the internally assessed units Before they complete 6ASS4, 5 and 6. That means that you must have added a Session on IRIS for 6ASS1, 2 and 3 and have marked them as PASSED. If Signature want to External Quality Assure these, we will email you to ask you to upload the Filmed Evidence, Candidate Assessment Record (CAR) and Individual Assessment Marksheet (IAM). Please do not upload these unless we ask you to.
BSL and ISL 201 – We are currently finalising a development, whereby any candidates who completes a 201 online (using the online mark sheet) will immediately find out their results once they save the results. We hope to launch this in the coming weeks, further information will be shared once this goes live.
201 Assessments – From September all 201 assessments will be done online.
If a student is self-isolating or has COVID-19 (given they are not too ill), they may still undertake a remote assessment should they wish to, so there is no need to cancel the exam. This is of course optional for students.
As of September, we will no longer be sending physical exam DVDs to our centres, instead, all assessments will be done online.
For 6ASS6 please could you only record the candidates’ answers, you may stop the video after each answer, this will ensure assessors can mark the assessments efficiently.
When emailing our customer support team with exam queries, please could you include a reference (B/SIG number or session ID) in the email subject to improve our efficiency.
Previously, when a centre invoice was raised, it was invoiced to the main centre address. We have changed this process so it now invoices to the centre’s ‘Accounts address’ (which is an optional field in IRIS). Can all centres ensure that if your billing address is different to the main centre address, that you enter it in IRIS in the ‘Account address’ field.