Quality Assurance is the assessment module built into Provider Manager. It gives your Local Authority team the tools to assess the quality of the providers you commission — from building your question sets to agreeing a final rating with your provider. This article explains what the module does, how it is structured, and how the on-site assessment journey works from start to finish.
What Quality Assurance does
Quality Assurance follows the same trusted hierarchy that shaped the legacy PAMMS system, so your ratings remain directly comparable with your previous assessments. You can assess any provider you work with:
A regulated Care Quality Commission (CQC) provider.
A non-regulated provider.
An Ofsted-registered children's service.
Whatever the service type, questions roll up into standards, standards roll up into domains, and those combine to produce the overall assessment rating. The scoring logic is unchanged from PAMMS.
The three layers of an assessment
Every assessment is built from three layers. Understanding these makes the whole module easier to follow:
Knowledge Bank: Where your questions, standards, domains, and best-practice guidance live.
Question template: The structured set of questions you assemble from your Knowledge Bank for a particular service type.
Assessment: The template applied to a specific provider, ready to conduct on-site or send for self-assessment.
📌 Note: Every assessment is carried out at service-type level, so make sure each item in your Knowledge Bank is tagged with the correct service type.
Two ways to assess
Quality Assurance gives you two ways to assess a provider:
On-site assessment: You sit with the provider, often over several days, and work through the questions together. This article follows the on-site journey.
Self-assessment: The assessment is sent straight to the provider in the Provider Gateway for them to complete themselves.
📌 Note: Self-assessments are covered in a separate guide.
The on-site assessment journey
The full on-site assessment journey follows six steps:
Build your Knowledge Bank — add questions, standards, and domains, by hand or by importing a spreadsheet.
Create a question template — assemble it in the drag-and-drop builder, then publish it.
Create an assessment — use the five-step wizard to apply your template to a provider.
Conduct the assessment — capture evidence and ratings in assessment mode, then submit.
Run the review loop — exchange comments and evidence with the provider until you agree.
Finalise and share — complete the assessment, then publish the rating or generate an action plan.
🤓 Tip: Try the spreadsheet import and AI build first — it's the fastest way to get a template ready.
Good and poor practice
Good practice
Tag every question, standard, and domain with the correct service type before building your template.
Keep templates as drafts while you refine them with colleagues, and only publish when you're ready.
Use Save Progress on multi-day on-site visits so nothing is lost.
Leave the hide overall rating until complete setting switched on so providers see the rating only once it's agreed.
Poor practice
Publishing a template before it has been reviewed — you can't edit a template once it's attached to an assessment.
Skipping the service type tag on Knowledge Bank items — assessments are always carried out at service-type level and untagged items won't appear.
Sharing the overall rating with the provider before the assessment is finalised — this can influence their responses before agreement is reached.
Summary
Quality Assurance gives your Local Authority team a structured, collaborative way to assess provider quality — from building your question sets in the Knowledge Bank, through conducting the assessment on-site, to agreeing and publishing a final rating with your provider. The familiar PAMMS hierarchy and scoring logic means your team can get started quickly, with AI tools available to speed up the heavy lifting.