Coming Soon EP-4589 Phase 2 Assessment Booking Enhancements

Overview

We have made various improvements and extensions to the new assessment bookings workflow and these can be looked at now on the sandbox as per the discussion on our latest UAT Release Demo Apr 11, 2025 .

You can view the run through of the changes here

Please note there may still be further changes made to this work, they are likely to be minor tweaks.

Below is a brief breakdown of these enhancements:

The addition of a booking note for each apprentice and component.
Option to make a booking note mandatory
A wording change for booking requests.
Changes to the rules governing how the location type is displayed.
A toggle to allow or prevent certain components from appearing in assessment bookings.
Location postcode -this has been renamed to “Assessor Location Postcode” and moved under the EPA section, and is now hidden for providers.
The ability to lock bookings, which prevents them from being edited.
More obvious prompts that an apprentice has reasonable adjustments.
A reason field when rejecting a booking request.
New allowed booking methods against assessment components.
The ability to multiselect apprentices when adding any guest type attendees, including on programme assessors and workplace mentors.
Changes to how components are ordered matching the schema ordering.
The added ability to select records across multiple pages on the assessment booking screens.
Auto vs manual booking - we have replaced the auto-booking with a scheduling helper
Providers will now only see one button to Request Booking & Notify
Auto-selection a default EPA for each component
Resits, reschedules, cancellations etc information is now displayed on the listing screens to aid identification
Milestones have been added to the Assessment Booking screen for internal users.
Addition of a Cancellations - Added in UAT see https://covalenttech.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1/article/4070703135
Removal of availability labels from the time slots.

Changes to functionality

Booking Notes

A new booking note field has been added to the assessment booking process and assessment plan screens allowing for a free text entry of a note against the assessment booking for that apprentice.

View of Booking Note

This new field can be managed in the following ways:

Under the new notes section on the assessment booking screen, you will find a set of note fields, one for each apprentice, on each assessment component.

Any text entered in these fields will be stored against the booking and displayed on the assessment booking screens and the assessment plan screen.

If you wish to set the same note against all the apprentices, you can click the “add note to all bookings” button which will open a popup window and allow you to enter a note, that will be added to all the fields for that component.
The booking note can also be saved and edited from the assessment plan screen.

Under the assessment bookings tab in the assessment component screen, we have also added a booking note description field, which can be used to provide information on what is required in the booking note.

Notes description field on the Assessment Component.

Providers view of the notes description

Mandatory Booking Notes

We have added an option to Entity Management → Assessment Components to allow you to select if you require the booking note to be mandatory, this is enabled with a toggle, to set if the booking note is required

Option under the new Assessment Bookings tab to make a booking note mandatory

Providers will be notified then when requesting the booking if they have not included a booking note if this is a mandatory note.

Booking Request Wording Change

We have changed various pieces of wording for when a provider is creating a booking request. This new wording makes it clearer that the booking the provider is making is only a request and will be reviewed.

Provider now sees this when requesting to book.

Location Type Changes

We have changed the location type fields so that the assessment centre option is always available.

Previously, if an assessment was marked as online, then the assessment centre field would be hidden. This has now been changed so that the assessment centre can be selected, even for online assessments, this can be used for customers who use Zoom Rooms.

Location Postcode

We have renamed the location postcode field to the Assessor Location field for greater clarity, along with the addition of some text to explain its purpose. This is intended as the location of where the EPA is for the assessment.

This field has been moved to the “Date and Time” step, alongside the EPA details. This change has also been made on the assessment plan.

We have also hidden it from the Provider view.

Assessment Component Visibility Toggle

We have added a new toggle in the assessment component management screen under the assessment bookings tab. This toggle is titled “Allowed on assessment bookings” and when toggled off, will prevent the component from being bookable under the assessment booking screens.

Visibility toggle and the Notes Description populated.

Important things to note are:

If a component is toggled off, any booking requests that have already been made with this component will still be processable.
The status of this toggle can be seen in the assessment component report.

The ability to lock booking requests

A new “Lock Batch” button as been added for any pending bookings for AO users.

Lock batch button

This new button will allow an AO user to lock the batch from being edited, but prevent any external users whilst it is being considered or processed by the AO user from amending it.

Some important things to note about this new tool are:

This button will lock the entire batch associated with any booking selected, regardless of if you are currently only processing one component or apprentice. This is because all bookings must remain in sync.
A warning will appear for users when the batch is locked, notifying them that it is not currently available for editing.

Provider user warning

This warning will also appear for the AO users, however, will have slightly more information for them.

AO user screen warning

The user that has locked a booking is stored for admin purposes.

More obvious reasonable adjustment flags

We have made 2 new additions to the assessment booking processes for when apprentices have reasonable adjustments.

The 2 changes are as follows:

Under the confirmation stage the “Has reasonable adjustments” label has been added next to the name of any apprentices who have reasonable adjustments, making it very obvious when going through the typical flow.

Pop up warning seen when a provider requests a booking that has an apprentice with a reasonable adjustment

A new popup warning has been added when a user attempts to book components where an apprentice has reasonable adjustments. This warning notifies them and is required to be confirmed to continue.

Rejection Reasons

New fields have been added to the process of rejecting an assessment booking, allowing for more information to be given when doing.

AO users Rejection Reason pop up

Some important things to note about this are the following:

The rejection process now includes a field of pre-defined options that the user can choose. These options are configurable in the custom dropdown screens as Assessment Booking Rejection Reasons.

New Custom Drop Down added

The rejection also includes a free text field for additional information.
The new fields are also shown in the assessment element report

Allowed booking methods

We have added configurable options to assessment components to allow a user to decide if the component can be booked as online and physical assessments.

Assessment Component edit screen showing the toggles

Some important things to note about this new feature are the following:

The options are located under the assessment type tab, within the assessment component management screens.
The 2 toggle options are located at the bottom of the section and are titled “Is Online Enabled” and “Is Physical Enabled”
These toggles control whether the respective assessment type option is displayed within the assessment booking screen and the assessment plan screen.
At least one of these options are required to be toggled on and saving will be prevented if they are not.
All existing components will default to all these options being enabled.

Easier Attendee Management

When managing attendees, we have added the ability to multi-select apprentices for each component. The way this impacts and expediates each workflow is by the following:

When adding guest attendees:

You may select multiple apprentices in the apprentice field.
You may then enter the details of your guest attendee.
This will then add that attendee against all the selected apprentices, meaning that the details do not have to be added for each.

When adding On Programme Assessors:

You may select multiple apprentices in the apprentice field.
This will then add the on programme assessor against each apprentices that you have selected. The on programme assessor will be the correct one for each apprentice.

When adding the work place mentor:

You may select multiple apprentices in the apprentice field.
This will then add the workplace mentor for each apprentice that you have selected. The workplace mentor will be the correct one for each apprentice.

Unfortunately, due to security with how user guests are made available, we are not currently able to allow the multi select option against user guests.

Defaulting EPA Selection

The assessment booking screens will now try to auto select an EPA for each component. It will attempt to choose the EPA based on the most common EPA found amongst the apprentices within that component booking.

It will check in order of most common EPA’s, then compare this to the list of EPA’s that can assess the component.

If required this can then be overwritten manually.

Identifying resits

The various listing screens for assessment bookings will now show if the booking is a resit, reschedule, cancellation and retraining (currently this states “retraining” this will be amended to something more consistent such as BiL/RR) .

In addition we have added new filter for resits, reschedules and retrainings* (*BiL/RR).

If the booking is a resit, the listing screen will now show how many resits have been booked in the past and compare this to the max resits for that component.
This is merely informational and will not stop the component from displaying.

Pending screen with the new filter highlighted

Resit & Retake screen with the details column

Milestones

We have added a new milestones stage to assessment bookings. This section is available to internal users only and mimics the functionality of the milestones stage in the assessment plan.

Any milestones that have not been manually assigned at this stage, will be assigned by default, based on their configuration.

Availability Labelling

We have removed the “availability” labels from the time slots in assessment bookings.

The availability indicators (traffic light colours) have also been removed from the timeslots in assessment bookings.

Maintaining Schema Order

We have fixed a bug in which the assessment components within the assessment booking screens would not match the component ordering against the schema if it was updated. This has now been changed so that the order displayed properly reflects the schema.

Ability to select records across multiple pages

This work is not currently on the Sandbox environment.

We have added the ability for the assessment booking screens to allow a user to select records across multiple pages. This is used in the following ways:

The user can tick the selection boxes against any records they wish to select.
These records will now be remembered until the user clears the selection.
A new box will appear at the top of the table showing how many records the user has selected.
A new clear selection button is also displayed, which will unselect all selected records.
Any records that the user has selected, will be ticked when they are displayed on screen.
These records will be remembered across screen changes and will need to be cleared when the user is done.
All checks will still be carried out when the user wishes to book the various selected components.
The number of records selected will also be shown in the booking components and add to booking buttons.

Impacted Areas

Assessment bookings → All listing screens and booking screens.
Assessment Plan Screen.
Entity management → Assessment Components

Permissions

None