Another recognised accreditation, and a formal UK certification pathway for our students!
We've been approved as an AQA Unit Award Scheme centre, under centre number 85587. It's worth explaining what that changes, because it moves what we can put in front of a school from good curriculum to recognised, certificated learning.
AQA is one of the largest awarding bodies in the UK. Its Unit Award Scheme certificates specific learning outcomes: it records what a student has actually done and understood in a given unit, and issues formal recognition for it. Schools and colleges use it to give portable credit for learning that sits outside traditional examined qualifications, which is exactly where esports has been stuck. Real skill, no paper to show for it. The Unit Award Scheme fixes that.
Being an approved centre means the units we deliver now come with AQA certification. When a student completes a unit, we claim an AQA certificate on their behalf - formal, portable recognition for the work they've actually done.
And this isn't limited to one programme. AQA certification runs across our whole portfolio. It certificates the schools work in MSPC, our Modern Sport Pathways and Competition framework - the competitive game skills that carry across titles like Valorant, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike 2, and the careers and production roles around competition, from casting and broadcast to journalism, social media, and team operations. And it reaches every other programme we run: the gaming-wellness curriculum in Mind Your Game, the venue-based training in Play The Game, the university course in The Business of Esports, and the educator training in our Esports Educator Certificate. Complete a unit in any of them, and the certificate follows.
And it won't sit at a single level. Certification runs from Entry Level upward across the scheme, so students earn recognition as they progress, rather than at one fixed tier.
This is another layer of recognition on top of a curriculum that is already independently accredited, and it does a distinct job. Accreditation of the curriculum says the course itself is well designed and holds up to scrutiny. The AQA Unit Award Scheme goes a step further, down to the individual: it recognises that a specific student did specific work. One says the course is good. The other says this student did the work. A school gets both - a programme that stands up to inspection, and certificates its students can actually hold.
That distinction is the whole point of how we build. Recognition has to sit on top of real learning, not stand in for it. An esports programme should stop being something that happens at lunchtime and become something a student carries on a certificate, into a university application, into a CV. Becoming an approved AQA centre is a real step toward that.
Our curriculum is open for purchase globally. Visit https://squid.gg or email us at business@squid.gg to bring it to your school, university, or venue.