The tutor guide

Running your class

PlumbMate's tutor tools turn student activity into teaching intelligence. Here's how to use them in practice.

Setting up your group

• Create a group in your tutor dashboard and share the college code with your students.
• When you create a group, choose its level — Level 1 (7202-01), Level 2 (6035-02), or not sampled in the IQA module (Level 3, short courses) — and change it later with the badge on its tag, unless its IQA plan already has samples.
• Rename or delete groups as your cohorts change — IQA plans stay linked through renames.
• Decide whether to turn the leaderboard on for that group — useful for some classes, distracting for others.

What a group can see. Learners in a group only see the levels you tick for it — Level 1, Level 2 (the video and written courses) or Level 3. You tick them when you create the group, and change them later from Sees: on its tag. This only affects learners whose access comes through your college. Existing groups see everything until you change it.

Archiving a group that has finished

• In ⚙ Menu → Manage Groups, click 🗄 on a group's tag. The group leaves your group lists, filters and counts, and the leaderboard's group ranking.
• Nothing is deleted. Its learners keep their access and their progress. The group filters list them under "🗄 Archived groups".
• The tutor dashboard and the IQA module each have their own archive, because teaching often ends before the IQA's final sampling and EQA visit. Archiving in one does not archive in the other.
• The Archive box has an unticked option, "Also archive this group in the IQA module". Tick it only when the IQA work is finished too.
• If the IQA module has archived a group and you haven't, Manage Groups shows a note saying when and by whom, with Archive here too.
• Show archived groups lists the groups you've archived. Unarchive brings one back, with an unticked option to unarchive it in the IQA module as well.

Reading a learner card

On the Learner Progress tab, each learner is a card. The badges by their name are quick signals you can read at a glance:

• 🎓 Predicted-grade tally — a green / amber / red count across the units they've worked on: green = on track for a Pass or better, amber = borderline, red = below the quiz pass gate.
• Group tag — the group they're in.
• Engagement score — a 0–100 score blending how recently, how consistently and how broadly they've been active. A read on momentum, not attainment.
• Weekly trend arrow — ↑ / ↓ / → versus last week's engagement. Click it for a small activity sparkline.
• 📌 "… to review" — how many Key Revision questions they've got wrong and not yet cleared. The higher the number, the more they've left outstanding.
• ⚠️ At Risk — shows only when you've flagged them (see below).
• 🔥 Streak / 🏆 best and last active — habit and recency at a glance.

Below the badges, the overall bar is their progress across every quiz and revision test. Open 📊 Per-unit breakdown for a ring per unit, then click a unit to see every quiz, revision test, Final Challenge and short-answer result.

Spotting at-risk learners

• Use the ⚠ Flag button on a learner's card to mark them At Risk — your own judgement call, separate from the automatic signals.
• Once flagged, they're collected at the top of the group filter: pick "⚠️ At Risk — All" to see every flagged learner, or "⚠️ At Risk — [group]" for one group. The number in brackets is how many.
• It's the quickest way to keep eyes on the handful of learners who need watching, without scrolling the whole list.

Nudging learners

A nudge is a short prompt that pushes a learner — or several — towards the work they need to do next on a unit: a gentle "have a go at this".

• From a learner's card: when a learner has units lagging, a 💡 "send extra work via AI Insights →" link appears, taking you to AI Insights for that learner.
• For a whole class on one unit: set the Unit filter to the unit you're teaching. The list becomes one row per learner — tick the ones you want and click 📣 Nudge selected to send them all at once. Sort the list (e.g. furthest behind first) to target quickly.
• Pair it with AI: from the AI Insights tab you can generate per-learner insights and 📋 study plans, giving your nudges something concrete to point at.

Reading the class heatmap

• The class heatmap rolls up every student's activity by Assessment Criterion.
• Red columns are where the whole class is struggling — recap these.
• Red rows are individual students in difficulty — worth a quiet word.
• The "Top 3 dangers" panel surfaces the three weakest ACs across the cohort, so you know exactly what to teach next.
• Teaching plan from a weak topic: click any red cell to drill into who's struggling, then generate a focused AI teaching plan for that one Assessment Criterion — a starter to edit before class. (That's per-topic; the whole-class teaching plan and homework live on the AI Insights tab — see below.)

✨ Learner Insights — AI analysis per student

• For any unit, click "Generate insights for all" — within a few seconds you get a 3–4 sentence AI summary on every learner: what they're getting right, where they're stuck, and what to do next.
• Names never leave PlumbMate. The AI sees performance data only — your learners are referred to as "Learner A", "Learner B" etc. when sent to the AI, and renamed back before display.
• Insights are cached and tagged with the time generated. If a learner has been active since, you'll see a "↻ Refresh" prompt so you know when an insight is stale.

📋 Class teaching plan & shared homework

• On the AI Insights tab, Generate teaching plan rolls all your learner insights (you need at least two) plus the class's strong and weak areas into a single, ready-to-teach lesson plan.
• In the same step it writes a shared class homework task — one piece of work for the whole class, aimed at the gaps the data revealed.
• That homework is what gets attached to the learner emails below — each learner receives their personal study plan and the class homework. It's also why the email buttons stay disabled until a teaching plan exists.

📋 Personalised study plans — sent straight to learners

• Once you've got insights, the 📋 Plan button on each learner card generates a 5–8 point study plan written directly to that learner, by name — tailored to exactly what their data shows they need to work on.
• Click "📋 Study plans for all" to bulk-generate. The button picks up missing AND stale plans and tells you the breakdown ("3 new + 2 stale = 5 total").
• Email them directly to learners. The 📧 Email button on a learner's card sends that one learner their personal plan plus the class homework. Or use ✉️ Email group plan to open your whole class as a list — everyone's ticked by default, so you can send to all at once, untick anyone to send to just a few, or hit Review on a row to preview an email before it goes.
• Prefer paper? You can also hand them out as printed PDFs (see below) or read them aloud in 1:1s.

📄 Printable PDF reports

• Class report (PDF) — a full unit-level write-up: cover page, LO breakdowns, every learner with insight + heatmap. Useful for cohort reviews and IQA samples.
• 📄 PDF on each learner card — a single-learner report you can share at parents' evenings or 1:1s.
• Study plans (PDF) — one printable booklet of every learner's personal study plan.
• All learner reports (ZIP) — a zip file with one PDF per learner, named by username, ready to drop into your VLE or email out in bulk.
• PDFs are generated on PlumbMate's servers — your browser doesn't have to do the heavy lifting, so it works just as well on a Chromebook or tablet.

Daily AI usage

• AI calls (insights, plans, teaching plans) count against a daily cap that resets at midnight UK time. The remaining count shows on the dashboard so you always know where you are.
• Different subscription tiers have different caps. If you're hitting the cap regularly, get in touch and we'll talk about a tier change.

Leaderboard

• Shows weekly and overall rankings within your group.
• Enable or disable per group — your call based on the class dynamic.

Internal quality assurance

A full IQA workflow for Level 1 (7202-01) and Level 2 (6035-02) — risk-rated sample size, a sampling grid, staff credentials, standardisation and the audit pack an EQA reads. Level 3 is externally set and externally moderated, so it is not sampled here.

📋 Open the IQA module → 📖 The full IQA guide →

The five steps, in order

1. Risk Profile — pick the group and the qualification, rate the assessors, and the module works out the sample size. Read the CAMERA panel underneath it: it says which of the six principles the plan can evidence and links to whatever closes the gap.
2. IQA Dashboard — the sampling grid. Every learner against every unit, with the plan already drawn across three visits.
3. QA Records — dates, documents and the staffing matrix.
4. Action Lists — what you and each assessor owe.
5. Reports & EQA — the audit pack, the folder sheets and assessor coverage.

The two courses are different shapes

Level 1 is thirty one assignments set by City & Guilds and marked against supplied criteria; Level 2 is a forty one section portfolio of competence decisions. So a grid column is a task at Level 1 and a portfolio section at Level 2, Level 1 outcomes are graded Pass/Merit/Distinction, and the tolerance is ±4 mm rather than ±3. Because the judgement involved is lower, the same team samples at 30% on Level 1 where it samples at 35% on Level 2 — and the rationale says why.

What decides the sample size

Five factors, weighted. Three you answer — cohort size, EQA standing and past performance; two are worked out for you. Assessor Experience and Past Performance come from the individual ratings you give each assessor, taking the most cautious amber-or-below rating rather than an average. Assessment Judgement is stated by the qualification.

The score runs to 28 and converts to a percentage, which four rules can raise but none can lower. The percentage then draws the grid: one cell in every 100 ÷ rate, laid diagonally so every unit is covered across the cohort rather than the same units on everybody.

A red-rated assessor does not raise the whole group's percentage. That would turn one person's risk into a blanket 100% across everybody, which the guidance warns against. Instead they raise a targeted instruction: verify every decision they made.

Who may assess

Under QA Records, a matrix gives every assessor and IQA a verdict per qualification, because the three handbooks ask for different things — TAQA is required for 6035-02, explicitly not required for 7202-01, and absent from 8202-35. The trade qualification carries a level; the assessor award splits by setting; and working towards means countersigned rather than blocked.

The three visits

The sampling plan is one diagonal across the year, cut into three roughly equal parts: safety and processes first, then everything up to the cylinder, then the rest. Each visit takes a different part of the folder, so each one samples different skills and knowledge — and because learners work at different speeds, each visit catches them at a different point in their programme. You can pin any unit group to a particular visit, and sampling earlier or later than planned is expected, not an error.

Trends in assessment practice

The module reads the whole cohort's sampling for unit clusters, systemic omissions, feedback quality and compliance gaps — and drops what it finds onto the next standardisation agenda with the context filled in. It is the part that makes the distinction an IQA is actually paid to make: is this a learner problem or an assessor problem?

The full IQA guide covers the rest: how the score becomes a percentage, the four rules that can raise it, what each CAMERA letter needs, the four routes to occupational competence, the agreed figures on the measured tasks, countersigning, and what goes in the audit pack. Level 1 in particular covers what 7202-01 does differently — the grade is the attempt, and the unit grade is arithmetic the module checks.