The Provision of Education Quality Assurance Services Contract

We're the independent regulator of more than 758,000 nurses, midwives and nursing associates across the United Kingdom. Our vision is safe, effective and kind nursing and midwifery care for everyone.

We promote high professional standards for nurses and midwives across the UK, and nursing associates in England. We maintain the register of professionals eligible to practise. We investigate when nursing or midwifery care goes wrong - something that affects less than one percent of professionals each year.

Safe, kind, effective care is at the heart of what we do and by promoting professionalism, we help to inspire confidence among the public and pride among nurses, midwives and nursing associates.

The responsibilities of the NMC for education and training are clearly set out in the Nursing and Midwifery Order (The Nursing and Midwifery Order, Part IV Education and Training, 2001). Our education standards shape the content and design of programmes to make sure that nurses, midwives and nursing associates are consistently educated to high standards and able to deliver safe and effective care not only when they join our register, but throughout their careers.

As part of our regulatory function, we approve education institutions against our education standards, and then monitor. These programmes include pre-registration nursing and midwifery, prescribing, and post-registration - such as Specialist Community Public Health Nursing and Specialist Practice Qualifications (General Practice Nursing, District Nursing). We currently have over 95 approved education institutions delivering nearly 2,000 nursing, midwifery, and nursing associate programmes.

In 2018, we embarked on an ambitious programme of developing new education standards, including standards of proficiency. In 2019, we implemented our new quality assurance framework, defining our expectations around quality assurance of our education and training programmes and outlining a more proportionate, risk-based approach to approvals and monitoring.

The culmination of this programme of reviewing our education standards, standards, and we expect all post-registration programmes to be approved against these new standards by August 2024.

Following the implementation of these post-registration standards, we will be commencing a programme of work to consider our role and approach to regulating Advanced Practice. This work is due to commence in 2023.

As we move beyond approvals against our new standards, we are shifting our focus towards ongoing monitoring of approved programmes and education institutions.

With the end of our current contract in 2024 we are Looking to procure a new QA Service Provider. This will be an exciting new opportunity as our work moves away from approvals, instead focusing more on monitoring in an efficient, data-driven and risk-based way, alongside the ongoing approval of any new providers or programmes. The QA Service Provider will need to work in close partnership with us, reflecting contemporary practice, supporting our ambitions, and providing flexibility.

As we've implemented our QA Framework, we've developed our ideas, received feedback from stakeholders and taken this on board to develop our requirements for the future. We're also developing our equality, diversity, and inclusion ambitions, as we've published our EDI objectives, whilst we continue our Ambitious for Change programme.

We would welcome early opportunities to discuss these requirements in more detail and explore your organisation's ambitions in this space, as we develop our specifications in more detail.

We are planning to go out to Tender in summer 2023.