Aat Level 3 – Preparing For End Point Assessment

When preparing evidence for your portfolio, remember that this is going to be the basis for your discussion. So anything in the portfolio needs to be something you can talk about in relative depth.

For your own time, and sanity, try and make sure that one piece of evidence covers more than one criteria. A better activity is to look at a piece of your work and think what does this show? rather than looking at the criteria and think how can I meet this? . There might be a degree of mopping up at the end with remaining criteria but you should be trying to show off your skills with the minimum of evidence.

You have three boxes to map evidence to, per criteria. This does not mean that you have to provide three pieces of evidence per criteria but it does mean that you shouldn t use more than three. If you don t think that you have currently shown evidence with the three you have, you should review the evidence and pick the best.

Because you are preparing your portfolio over a period of time, better evidence might come along as you progress through your apprenticeship. Therefore the best thing to do is collect anything you think is relevant and then do a final review on the portfolio when you are ready to submit. It is worth keeping a folder on your desktop that you just drop work into when you feel it might be evidence, and then you and your assessor can review this periodically.

Each criteria on the mapping document needs to have a specific piece of evidence mapped to this, no areas are allowed to be blank.

Keep an eye on the verbs in the criteria:

Verb

Evidence

Describe

Give an account, including all the relevant characteristics, qualities, or events.

Demonstrate

Show in a clear way

Do words like report , deal , prepare , achieve ,

Don t just write about, we need to see evidence of you creating reports, or recording data. Most of the evidence in the portfolio is based on this.

Evaluate

Using your own knowledge, make a judgement on a situation, looking at different factors, pros and cons, and concluding your findings.

Identify

Recognise, list, or name characteristics.

Review

Survey information and conclusions and decide if the process is effective

Revise

Make amendments for a better course of action

What do you mean by evidence ?

There is quite a range of acceptable evidence, again reiterating quality over quantity here. In the table below I can give examples of evidence, and best practice format of this.

Type of evidence

Good quality

Low quality

Work product An example of your work, this could be a report you have produced or set of screenshots of processes on Sage/ accounting software, for example posting a supplier payment.

As well as just the evidence, make sure you annotate this. Pretend you are writing a user guide to show what you do and when. But the key point is why show why you are doing this and this will link to many criteria. For example are you applying any ethical principles or accounting concepts, are you aware of the decision made from the reports you produce.

Poor evidence in this area would be just the report or screenshots with no annotation.

Poor annotations would just identify what the assessor can already see, for example pointing to a customer name field and saying this is a customer name . Remember that the assessor is AAT qualified at the very least, so they are going to know the basics! What they don t know is why you perform certain tasks and what you know about the process as a whole.

Work product Emails / letter communication evidence remember to redact all confidential information. But emails are great to show evidence of communication as well as you doing some good work.

Again, annotation is important. If it s an email you sent, why are you sending it? Why are you using the language within? What is the context and who is your audience. Why might you use this method over another?

If it s an email from someone, or a conversation back and forth, again why is it needed, what is the context, and what are you demonstrating?

Simple, non annotated evidence doesn t say much. An email from your manager saying well done on meeting your deadline is good, but one being clearer on what deadline, and the skills you showed to meet it, as well as the consequences is better. It might feel positive to fill your portfolio with praise, but try and think about what each piece of evidence actually shows.

Work product an appraisal or performance review with your manager

These are used a lot and they are either very useful or very poor. Useful ones have clear detail about what you do at the moment, areas to improve, and how you have used your skills and behaviours. They could link to team working and communication areas on the mapping document. But only if they are clear how you do these things, not just that you do them. Ideally an appraisal can be backed up with a reflective statement.

A non annotated basic appraisal is not useful. This might show that you perform certain tasks, that you have areas for improvement, and that you demonstrate certain skills but it will not identify why and how you show these. An annotation or reflective statement could turn this around though.

Witness testimony a statement from someone you work with, a manager ideally, explaining how you meet criteria.

Detail is key here. A generic WT is not going to give the detail. It needs to be personalised to you, explaining exactly the skills and behaviours you have shown in meeting a specific criteria or project. Again referring to why you have done things, what you have done well and what might be improved. Showing weakness in evidence is fine there is a whole question in the discussion about challenges, so you don t have to always show where you did things well just make sure you can assess this and provide a plan to do things better in the future.

Generic WTs are submitted often and they provide no evidence at all unfortunately. They are often written to match the criteria word for word. For example John reviews and revises calculations and estimates in line with the company s performance . This means very little to an assessor, because we want to know how you do this and the skills you apply to this area.

Reflective Statement a statement written by you to explain a process that you do at work, or the skills you show to meet criteria.

A statement should really have supporting evidence such as a work product in order to provide back up and context. Again each statement should explain that you know why you do things, and you can consider things like strengths and weaknesses, what you might do better next time, as well as how you feel things went well.

Similar to the WT, you can t just state I do this , or copy criteria word for word. For example, I handle objections, conflict and difficult messages sensitively and confidentially . You need to show how you do this by giving an example of a situation and explaining your management of this then pointing out how this was sensitive, how you met confidentiality etc.

Preparing for the professional discussion:

At level 3, there are 6 questions to be covered in the discussion. You are allowed to be pre informed of 4 of them everyone is asked the same. The last two are nothing to panic about. They will be based on evidence in your portfolio and your apprenticeship as a whole. You re not going to be asked to calculate a VAT return, prepare an appropriation account, or reel off accounting standards. That s what your exams are for.

The 4 main questions are:

1) Give a summary of your role within the organisation.

2) How do you think your role has benefited the organisation?

3) Tell me about an achievement/product/activity you are particularly proud of.

4) Describe some of the challenges you ve encountered during your apprenticeship.

Some examples of the other questions might be:

Explain communication methods you use in the workplace and if you have to adapt your language for different audiences.

Give some examples of the decisions that are made from the work that you produce.

Can you explain why your work needs to be accurate?

Give me some examples of the deadlines that you have at work and how you manage to meet them.

The questions above are not exhaustive and each apprentice in your class could be asked different ones. They are not taken from a bank and are not randomly selected, they are based upon what else the End Point Assessor needs to know about your work and your apprenticeship. If there are weak points in your portfolio, they will be based around these areas. If your portfolio is strong, they will be more challenging in order to get the best grade for you.

The key about the discussion is that it is a discussion. It is not a question and answer session, it is not an exam. Therefore, your End Point Assessor will speak more than six times they are allowed to prompt you and ask you to develop on areas. Likewise, you can ask the Assessor things. You can ask them to expand on their questions, or give examples in order to help your understanding. And you can tell them to give you a second to have a think!

Because it s a discussion to assess your progress through the apprenticeship, No , I do not know and I do not do this are acceptable answers. Please don t think you have failed if you have had to use one of these answers. Each apprentice has a different role, and you might not have to , for example, meet deadlines. An Assessor s response to this will probably be to ask you what you would do in future if their question became relevant so we could expand on the deadline question by talking about time management and how you might act in a situation.

Please note that whilst those sorts of answers are relevant in the discussion, you must be able to meet all criteria in the mapping document for the portfolio before it is submitted. This is a requirement of all L3 AAT Apprentices.

The chief assessor noted that a lot of students had forgotten their evidence by the time of the discussion, this is likely due to the length of time it takes to schedule the discussion and should get better. However once this is scheduled please make sure you have refreshed yourself with the content of your portfolio as your End Point Assessor will be asking questions on it!

Relax in the discussion. It s your chance to talk about you. End Point Assessors are generally AAT tutors or have been recently and they are all AAT qualified so they do have an awareness of what it s like to be an AAT student. Feel free to show off with anything you want to say but also make sure you stick to the points in hand, talking about your apprenticeship and progress.