SRCF / review

How the review works — and where it stands

A first full technical review pass over the Working Draft is complete — run in-house, not by independent reviewers. The independent round, with appointed external reviewers and signed conflicts and independence declarations, has not run yet, and registration of interest is open now. Both cycles are private and authenticated; a separate public consultation, with moderated comments and formal responses, follows later.

Practitioners convened in a traditional hall

The profession, convened · every comment on the record

Where the review stands

The first full pass is complete

CoverageEverything, not a sampleThe pass went through all 81 competency units, all 72 domain review questions and all 30 cross-domain questions — 102 questions, every one answered on the record against the register as it stood on 14 August 2026. No domain was sampled and none was skipped.81 units · 72 domain + 30 cross-domain questions

Findings20 evidenced comments, severity-rated2 Critical, 16 Major, 2 Minor. The pass recorded its own recommendations unit by unit: 61 no change, 10 editorial edits, 10 revise before approval. Both Critical findings — duplicated evidence identifiers in D.8, and 22 vocabulary identifiers reused across categories in the review taxonomy — are resolved by identifier repair IDR-1, dated 22 August 2026, and the repaired identifiers are live in the published machine-readable export. The repair touched evidence and taxonomy identifiers only: the 81 unit IDs were unaffected and remain permanent. The 16 Major findings are content work in progress, and none of the 20 findings has been formally dispositioned — disposition is a Council gate and it has not been reached.2 Critical · 16 Major · 2 Minor · both Critical resolved

Who did itOur own technical team, and we say soThe pass was run in-house, in a London Reporting Academy working session, and prepared for the Secretariat. No reviewer signed a conflicts and independence declaration, no formal review gate was moved forward, and every unit, question and comment record is held at “In progress” or “Draft” pending the independent round. It is an internal check: not independent review, not assurance, not certification and not a Technical Council opinion. The register remains a Working Draft, not approved content.in-house · no declaration signed · no gate moved

In September 2026 an external subject-matter expert reviewed the register overview and proposed 20 revisions — 15 competency unit titles, four competency-area names and one domain core question. All were accepted and applied to the canonical register workbook as revision 1.2.2. These are a different 20 from the review comments above and unrelated to them. That was a named review held on the Secretariat's record, not an independent one: no conflicts and independence declaration was signed, and it covered the overview rather than the full register. The content version published on this site remains 1.4.0, review package 1.2, until the next release snapshot.

What “complete” does and does not mean

Complete means the pass covered the whole register and every review question, and that its findings are written down, severity-rated, tied to object IDs and traceable. It does not mean the register is approved, independently reviewed, assured or ready for release. Independence here means what the process below requires: appointed reviewers from outside the Secretariat who complete a conflicts and independence declaration before any assignment activates, and whose comments and proposed dispositions go to the Council review gate. None of that has happened. Which is the point — a full internal check is what makes the independent round worth an expert's time, not what replaces it.

The round that is open

How the independent round works

These steps are the review cycle as its participants experience it. They sit inside the due process that precedes Technical Council approval — the full route from agenda identification to controlled release is set out under governance.

Apply

Qualified practitioners, employers, educators and specialists apply through the reviewer portal. Appointment is selective, not automatic.

Declare

Approved applicants complete a conflicts and independence declaration before any assignment becomes active.

Review

Reviewers work through their assigned domains against structured review questions, in a private, authenticated workspace. The completed first pass is part of the reviewer pack: its comments, severities and supporting evidence are visible, and a reviewer is free to disagree with any of them — an internal finding carries no more weight than the argument behind it.

Comment

Every formal comment is tied to an object ID, a component code and a content version — one substantive issue per comment, with evidence or rationale.

Employer validation

Role profiles, target levels, tasks and outputs are tested against real corporate reporting work through structured employer interviews — before Council approval and before any decision to publish an Exposure Draft. Findings enter the same review record and are dispositioned alongside the reviewers' comments. Participation may be named with written consent or stay anonymous, and grants no SRCF status.

Disposition

The Secretariat and Technical Council analyse, decide and implement on the record. Critical comments block approval until resolved or formally decided.

Respond

A response-to-comments document closes the cycle, so a reviewer can see what happened to their input and why.

Become a reviewer

The first pass is done; the independent round is what it was done for, and it is being commissioned now. Registration of interest is open: qualified practitioners, employers, educators and specialists — including faculty and academic specialists — can register here. Appointment is selective, not automatic, and begins with a conflicts and independence declaration; formal applications move to the reviewer portal as it ships. Appointed reviewers start from a register that has already been checked end to end, with 20 documented findings and a stated position to argue with, rather than from a blank draft.

Reviewer portal — for appointed reviewers