The initial contact with City & Guilds will be to check if you meet our conditions for becoming a centre. Please get in touch with our local representative office in your country or region to discuss the criteria with our Business Development team.

At this stage, you will need to provide information about:

1. Your learners – providers wishing to become centres must enrol a certain number of learners per course per year.
2. Your resources – you must have appropriate facilities, fully trained staff, and robust management and quality assurance systems in place.

Once we have established that you meet our conditions and have explained what kind of support documents we need from you, we will invite you to apply to become a City & Guilds centre, and will send you the application for Centre Approval form.

You can find contact details for your local office here.

The next step is the submission of your application; please follow these steps:

1. Complete & Authorise your form – please complete your application for Centre Approval. Your application must be authorised by a person with sufficient authority to take business and financial decisions in your centre.
2. Submit your form – send your form and supporting documentation by email to our City & Guilds office in your country or region, and arrange payment of the appropriate fee.

After receiving your email, our Quality Assurance (QA) team will check your submitted documents and send you an acknowledgement receipt by email. They will then arrange for an External Verifier to visit you.

This visit involves an External Verifier checking your premises and procedures, to make sure you are able to become a centre and offer our qualifications. The External Verifier’s role is to make a report, not to make the final decision – this is done by the QA team.

During their visit, the External Verifier will discuss their findings and recommendations with you.

If you need to make changes in order to gain centre status, the External Verifier will create an action plan and agree a timeframe with you to implement the changes. Depending on the changes needed, they may visit you again before the approval decision is made.

Once our Quality Assurance team has established that you meet all of our conditions for approval, we will notify you by email. We will send you a certificate of approval, together with additional documentation and materials. We will also allocate you a centre number, which you will need to use when communicating with us.

These are the types of resources you will receive free of charge with our courses:

• Qualification handbooks
• Assessment packs
• Assessment support
• Exemplar assignments
• Practice question papers
• Sample schemes of work
• Further reading/links
• Equipment lists
• Recognitions lists
• Access to Walled Garden, our administration tool

You may also benefit from SmartScreen, our online teaching and learning resource portal.

SmartScreen is an extra resource that helps you save time and money, as well making the delivery of our courses even easier, so that your learners have the best possible experience.

It contains all the necessary teaching and learning support material, which includes tutor forums, lesson plans, presentations, handouts, worksheets and equipment lists. Practice question papers are also available through SmartScreen to help learners prepare for assessment.

Login details are available on request via Walled Garden, our free online administration service. Walled Garden is fast and efficient, performing a multitude of functions from enrolling learners to submitting their results.