ACE Submission Recharge Postponed
As you are aware, one of the Federation’s key business objectives is to reduce the level of rejections relating to Apprenticeship Certification claims made through the ACE system.
During 2013/14, the average rejection rate has been 29.37%. The financial and resourcing costs of dealing with this level of rejections have been significant for both Training Providers and Certification Bodies.
Working in partnership with stakeholders, our aspiration was that the current rejection level be addressed and reduced to 20% within a 6 month period. Part of the overall strategy in achieving this was to introduce a recharging payment system for the resubmission of rejected claims. This was due for implementation on 1st November 2014.
However, we are pleased to report that other initiatives, that were part of our rejection redressing strategy, have had a very positive effect and we have seen the current level of ACE rejections reduce to 18% in September and 19% in October. This is a fantastic achievement and a reflection of the excellent partnership working which has taken place over the last couple of months.
During September, The Federation revised, consulted on, updated and reissued a series of ACE support and guidance documents for use by all ACE users. These are the “SASE Transferable Skills Guidance” and the “Acceptable Evidence Guidance”. We also developed, and on the 1st October launched, the ACE-IT online training tool to help train and inform ACE users to correctly identify acceptable forms of evidence and also when certain evidence types are non-acceptable.
We are extremely grateful to all the Training Providers and Certification Bodies who took the time to work with us on the above initiatives and have helped to shape the ACE support and guidance materials that are currently available. As promised, we are currently undertaking the first review of the Acceptable Evidence document and will take on board feedback that we have received from users. An updated version will be issued at the end of this review period.
As promised, in our ACE submission recharge consultation document issued 21st July, we also hosted 6 briefing/consultation sessions for Training Providers during September and these were very well attended and received. At these events we briefed attendees on the forthcoming new documentation and also discussed ways in which they could start addressing their own rejection rates. Many Training Providers have subsequently been working with us to address their rejection levels by using bespoke reports that we can extract from ACE. This has helped them to identify any patterns in rejections and address them accordingly.
Not only have these initiatives helped address ACE rejections, they have also helped to develop and maintain collaborative working between Training Providers, Certification Bodies and the Federation.
In the light of the above, we have taken the decision to postpone indefinitely the introduction of the recharging system for rejection resubmissions on ACE.
Despite the current progress, there is still more work to be done! We are committed to supporting you in continuing to address rejections and are here to listen and work with you on all matters relating to ACE certification.
We monitor rejection rates on an ongoing basis. If you haven’t already done so, you can contact the Federation for further details relating to rejections for your organisation. Report requests to be sent to: reportrequests@fisss.org specifying the required duration of report. Please note, rejection rate reports can only be run from 1st April 2014 onwards.
NOTE: For information relating to the original recharging proposal and consultation document please click here.
