Developing competence standards - useful resources for staff
Posted on behalf of: Student Experience
Last updated: Monday, 14 July 2025

As part of our reasonable adjustments review we are developing a process to help identify the competence standards for each of our courses and clearly communicate these to students. Doing this will support us in fulfilling our duties under the Equality Act (2010), providing clarity for our students and staff, and enabling inclusive learning environments for our students.
Competence standards are the essential elements (knowledge or skills) of a course. The process to identify them will develop over time but is important to get them right as competence standards do not need to be adjusted for students. In many cases they may be similar to a course’s learning outcomes, but they are not the same.
Caroline Roberts, Head of Legal Services and Graeme Pedlingham, Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Student Experience explain a little more in the short (7 min 30 sec) video below:
If you are responsible for developing competence standards, we are offering the following resources and support:
Competence standards briefing note
You can find out more about competence standards, including helpful examples, in this briefing note.
Webinar and Q&A replay
We hosted a webinar and Q&A to help staff writing competence standards and answer some of their questions. You can watch the replay or read the transcript below.
Please note: the webinar captions are automatically generated by Panopto.
Join one of our drop-in sessions
You are invited to an upcoming drop-in session where you will have the opportunity to develop your competence standards with experts on hand to answer your questions.
Sessions will be held on the following dates and you can drop in at any time:
- Thursday 7 August, 2pm-5pm
- Wednesday 3 September, 9.30am-12.30pm
Location: JUB-115 Jubilee Building.