Ascentis · RQF Level 3
Ascentis (AptEd) Level 3 Certificate in Community Development (QCF)
You don’t just earn this. You learn to use it, one-to-one, on your own real work.
- LevelRQF Level 3
- Total credits27
- Units in this qualification23
Awarded by Ascentis · on the Ofqual register
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See how this course maps onto your role
Ten quick questions, one per Future Fluency, asked against this qualification rather than a generic one.
About 5 minutes · No card · Nothing to commit to
What you’ll learn
What each unit actually teaches you to do
These are the units Ascentis registers against this qualification. It is a catalogue, not a syllabus. Which of them you take depends on the combination the qualification requires, and that is set by the awarding body rather than by us. Every unit here is regulated, and every one you earn is yours to keep.
Community development values and processReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand value-based community development
- Understand the competencies required of community development workers
- Understand the role of reflection and learning in community development practice
Community group developmentReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Set up inclusive groups within communities
- Build and develop inclusive autonomous groups within communities
- Develop collabourative working practices between community groups
Community group dynamicsReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand the impact of people’s involvement in community groups
- Understand roles and relationships in community groups
- Understand the factors affecting the autonomy and inclusiveness of community groups
Conduct community-led researchReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand the stages in community based research
- Understand strategies and methods to conduct inclusive and participatory research in communities
- Plan, analyse and present research findings
- Understand legal and ethical issues in community research
Determine community needsReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand change in communities
- Engage with communities to determine needs
- Use information about communities and their needs
- Review approaches and practices to work with communities to identify needs
Develop and maintain community partnershipsReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand inclusive approaches in community partnership working
- Develop and support community partnerships structures and processes
- Monitor and evaluate effective community partnership working
Develop community resourcesReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand how to audit community resources eg assets, skills, finance
- Take a strategic approach to securing resources for community initiatives
- Support communities to generate resources
Develop sustainable communitiesReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand the principles of and approaches to sustainable communities
- Promote and develop community assets that support sustainable communities
- Support communities to assess their level of sustainability
- Assist communities to acquire the skills and knowledge to develop sustainable communities
Developing formal voluntary or community organisationsReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand organisational structures, processes and governance used in voluntary and community organisations
- Support voluntary and community organisations to meet the needs of diverse communities
- Support voluntary and community organisations to develop a shared vision
- Advise voluntary and community organisations on personnel requirements
- Advise on the implementation of decision making structures in voluntary and community organisations
- Support voluntary and community organisations to plan
Engage Communities in Environmental ActionReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Engage people in community-based environmental action.
- Understand national and local approaches to environmental concerns and environmental justice.
- Plan community environmental action aligned to global environmental issues.
- Support communities in taking environmental action.
Implement and review community campaignsReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Access and provide skills and resources to community campaigns
- Support community groups in running campaigns
- Revise campaign plans
Implement and review community projectsReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Explain the scope of specific community projects
- Support the delivery of community projects to meet planned objectives
- Collectively review and report progress for community projects
Monitoring and evaluationReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand how the community development values and legal requirements inform monitoring and evaluation
- Monitor community-based projects, groups, activities and community development practice
- Evaluate community-based projects groups, activities and community development practice
- Prepare evaluation and monitoring reports
Organising community eventsReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Establish the purpose and shared vision of events
- Plan community events with the community, stakeholders and partners
- Understand the legal responsibilities of event management
- Publicise an event
- Evaluate community events with the community, stakeholders and partners
Plan community campaignsReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand the purpose and approaches of community campaigning
- Plan community campaigns collectively
- Engage and involve communities in campaigns
Planning of community projectsReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand planning for community projects
- Engage groups and individuals in planning community projects
- Support communities to plan community projects
Publicity and marketing for community organisationsReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand the various reasons why community organisations need to promote their services and activities to the public.
- Understand the key differences between publicity and marketing strategies and their respective roles.
- Support community organisations in devising and implementing a comprehensive publicity plan.
- Support community organisations in devising and implementing a comprehensive marketing plan.
- Review and respond appropriately to feedback received from publicity or marketing campaigns.
Reflective community development practiceReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Use action-reflection processes and techniques
- Evaluate value based community development practice
- Use reflection and evaluation to improve own practice
Social inequality, injustice and diversity in communitiesReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand the diversity of communities
- Understand the impact of social inequality, diversity and injustice on communities
- Understand how the dynamics of power and influence impacts on communities
Support community development learningReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Identify factors that support and inhibit learning
- Identify and meet people’s learning needs
- Understand the theoretical underpinnings of community development learning
Support community representationReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand the context for community representation
- Identify roles of community representatives
- Identify the knowledge and skills for community representation
- Ensure the accountability of community representatives
- Understand and be able to support people in their role of community representatives
Understand partnership working in communitiesReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand partnership working in communities to meet community needs
- Understand the issues to consider for community involvement in partnerships
- Understand opportunities for partnership working within and between sectors
Understanding and Influencing Local Decision-MakingReal unit · Ascentis
What you'll be able to do
- Understand how local government works.
- Understand the changing nature of local governance of public agencies or bodies.
- Understand the relationship between local and central government.
- Understand the roles of elected representatives in relation to community issues.
- Support communities to influence decision-making about community issues.
The honest bit
You’ve started things before
Most courses were built for a room full of people who aren’t you. A cohort moves on whether or not your week allowed it, and by the third week the thing you’re behind on becomes the reason you stop opening it.
There’s no cohort here, and no timetable to fall behind. Before anything starts, Zavmo asks when you’re sharpest and how long you can realistically sit down for, then builds the sessions around those answers. A bad fortnight changes your pace. It doesn’t put you behind.
And you only pay once you start learning. Searching and planning are free, and you can cancel any time — so the cost of finding out is an afternoon, not a year.
Your passport
Every credit is a stamp you keep
Level 3 credits are regulated. They don’t vanish when a subscription ends or a website closes. They travel to any employer, and Zavmo keeps the map of what you’ve earned and what’s next.
Each stamp is a real unit registered against this qualification.
Who’d teach you this
The Evidence Evaluator
Assessor
Helps you show what you can actually do, gathering the evidence that proves it as you learn.
Meet all twelve tutorsWhere this connects
Where these credits take you
A qualification is never a dead end here. See the jobs its credits open, the national occupational standards its units map to, and the future skills they quietly build.
- Advise on organisational structures to support community development
- Analyse and disseminate findings from community research
- Contribute to developing democratic and decision making structures and procedures
- Develop yourself as a community development practitioner
- Develop, implement and evaluate a strategy for increasing electoral participation
- Enable groups and communities to become autonomous
- Ensure the effective functioning of the voluntary or community organisation’s Board of Trustees
- Facilitate community learning for social and political development
Where this can lead
Community Relations Coordinator
Your journey here starts with getting the basics right, but the sky's the limit for where you can take your career. We're looking for someone who sees this Coordinator role not just as a job, but as the first exciting chapter in a long and impactful career in community relations.
See the whole journey →Showing 6 roles, drawn from 68 job records mapped to this qualification.
Skills it covers
What the job actually needs. These are the standards the units are built against, in the words employers and awarding bodies already use for the work itself.
How you’ll actually learn this
One-to-one, on your own real work
A qualification is usually something done to you: sit the class, sit the exam, hope it sticks. Here it’s the opposite. You learn it one-to-one with a companion, on your own real work, and you keep going until you can use it, not just recall it.
Applied to your work in any of these jobs
- Remember
- Understand
- Apply
- Analyse
- Evaluate
- Create
Built for Ascentis (AptEd) Level 3 Certificate in Community Development (QCF)
23 units in this credential, in the order it lists them, awarded by Ascentis.
- Community development values and process
- Community group development
- Community group dynamics
- Conduct community-led research
- Determine community needs
- Develop and maintain community partnerships
and 17 more in the full unit list below.
One to one, not one to many
No two people run this the same way
A course is written once and handed to everyone. This is assembled around you, and keeps changing as it learns you. Five things it reads, and what each one changes.
- Your actual work Every unit is taught against a live piece of your own work, not a worked example from a textbook.
- What you already know The first conversation finds your starting point, so you skip what you can already do and spend the time on what you cannot.
- The conditions you learn under Not a learning-styles quiz. The evidence does not support those. The dimensions the research does back, read once and used to shape the plan.
- How far you got last time It picks up mid-thought. The tutor knows what you said, what you struggled with, and what it asked you to try.
- Which tutor suits the moment Twelve of them, each for a different kind of thinking. The one who walks you through a first idea is not the one who stress-tests it.
See how you learn, free. Eight questions, no sign-up. A directional taster; the diagnostic inside Zavmo goes deeper and keeps adapting.
Why it sticks
Most courses stop at remembering
There’s a well-known ladder of how deeply you learn something, called Bloom’s Taxonomy. Most courses get you up the first two rungs: you remember some facts, you pass a test, you forget it. Real skill lives at the top. Judging, deciding, creating. And this isn’t a generic ladder: every rung has a named Zavmo tutor who walks you up it.
- 6CreateThe Creative Catalyst
- 5EvaluateThe Evidence Evaluator
- 4AnalyseThe Analyst
- 3ApplyThe Coach
- 2UnderstandThe Connector
- 1RememberThe Builder
Where most courses leave you Where Zavmo takes you
The value
Why the companion is worth £70 a month
You’re not paying for the units. They’re regulated, and the same wherever you earn them. You’re paying for the one thing that decides whether you actually get there: a companion that makes them stick, on your real work.
That is one-to-one on this qualification, every day, on the work you already do, for £70 a month. Your first module is free, so you can see the teaching before you pay for any of it. Billed monthly, cancel any time and billing stops.
Earned on your own work, taught to the top.
Everything you just read, learned one-to-one on the job you already do. Your first module is free, so you can see the teaching before you pay for any of it.
Build my plan, freeNo card. See how this qualification maps onto your role and meet the tutors who’d teach it, free. The learning begins when you subscribe. It’s £70 a month, billed monthly. Cancel any time and billing stops.