About CBA UK
Governance
Who decides what, how commercial interest is kept apart from assessment decisions, the regulatory position, and the routes of appeal and escalation.
The organisation
- Registered name
- Corporate Business Alliance Ltd
- Registered office
- 167–169 Great Portland Street, 5th Floor, London, W1W 5PF, United Kingdom
- Contact
- support@cba-uk.com
Who decides what
Three roles carry every decision that affects a candidate, and they are held apart so that the person deciding what a credential costs is never the person deciding whether it has been earned.
Head of Assessment
Convenes standard-setting panels and chairs them without submitting judgements. Triages every malpractice report. Decides every reasonable adjustment request. Signs off item reviews and scheme versions.
Appeals reviewer
Decides appeals against results and against conduct findings. Must have taken no part in the original decision; where that is not possible, the appeal goes to an external reviewer instead.
Commercial and operations
Pricing, partner accreditation, marketing and the business generally. Explicitly excluded from standard-setting panels and from any decision about an individual candidate’s result.
Where one person would otherwise hold two of these roles for a particular decision, that decision goes outside CBA: an appeal is decided by an external reviewer, and a standard-setting panel is made up of subject-matter experts who are not CBA staff.
Impartiality
These rules keep commercial decisions apart from assessment results. Each is published elsewhere on this site:
- The pass mark is set by a panel of at least three subject-matter experts working from the questions themselves, and is not adjusted afterwards to produce a particular pass rate. How cut scores are set
- Nobody with responsibility for revenue sits on a panel or attends one. This is written into the standard-setting policy.
- The blueprint is published in full, with exact domain weightings, and every paper is assembled to it.
- Every question is reviewed by somebody other than its author before it can appear in a live paper. An item with no recorded reviewer cannot be activated.
- Appeals are decided by someone who took no part in the original decision, and there is no fee to appeal. Complaints and appeals
- A defective question is corrected for everybody it affected, including candidates who already passed and did not complain.
Regulatory position
CBA’s position on the accreditations and recognitions most often asked about.
- Accredited to ISO/IEC 17024
- No. CBA is not accredited by UKAS or by any other accreditation body and does not describe itself as accredited. Any change will be published here with the certificate number.
- A regulated awarding organisation
- No. CBA awards its own professional certifications. They are not regulated qualifications; CBA is not recognised by Ofqual, SQA, Qualifications Wales or CCEA; and there is no statutory regulator above CBA for assessment decisions.
- Equivalent to a degree, or to another body’s credential
- No. CBA publishes what each credential is assessed by, at what level, and against which discipline. CBA does not map its credentials onto national frameworks or onto any other body’s qualifications, having no authority to do so.
- Affiliated with, or endorsed by, another certification body
- No. We use nobody else’s marks, and where we mention another organisation it is for identification only.
Appeals, complaints and escalation
Appeals against a result, complaints about service, and reports of malpractice each have a published procedure with stated deadlines, and each is decided by a person who took no part in the matter complained of.
Where CBA’s own process is exhausted: complaints about the handling of personal data may be taken to the Information Commissioner’s Office, and complaints about advertising to the Advertising Standards Authority. As CBA is not a regulated awarding organisation there is no external appeal route for an assessment decision; CBA’s appeals procedure is the final route.