Direct answers, in writing, before you ask.

They are different instruments, and a mature system carries both. TASS accreditation recognises an institution’s commitment to dual career support, and ALC is affirmative of that work throughout. An independent audit examines something accreditation is not designed to examine: how the environment is actually operating in practice, evidenced across athlete consultation, documentation, and system review, and rated against auditable standards. Accreditation says an institution has committed. An audit shows what that commitment is producing. ALC is complementary to TASS and never a substitute for it.

Because independence is the product. An auditor who also sells the fix has a financial interest in what the audit finds, which is why financial audit and consulting were structurally separated across the corporate world. ALC takes no remediation contracts and holds no stake in any finding beyond its accuracy. That is precisely what makes the report one your governing body can rely on. What you do with the findings is yours, delivered with enough evidence and clarity that your own teams can act on them.

Twelve weeks. Evidence is gathered from three sources: structured consultation with your student-athletes, your institution’s own documentation, and a system review of how decisions are made in practice. The institutional burden is deliberately contained, and the full requirements are set out in the engagement letter before anything begins, so there are no surprise asks mid-engagement.

You do. The report is delivered to your leadership, structured for audit committee use, and it is yours. ALC does not publish institutional findings, does not name clients without written consent secured after completion, and does not share your data with any third party. Whether and how you share the report is your decision.

Athlete consultation is conducted under informed consent, and findings are reported so that no individual athlete is identifiable to the institution. Institutional data is held under the terms of the engagement letter and ALC’s data protection documentation, all of which is available on the governance page before you ever sign anything. De-identified, aggregated outcomes may enter ALC’s longitudinal Outcomes Record only under a consent-based data rights clause agreed in the engagement letter, which is what allows every audited institution to be benchmarked against the wider network over time.

Some will be. An audit that only confirms what an institution already believes about itself has no value, and a report with an Absent rating in it is evidence the process was honest. Two things protect you. First, every rating is traceable to its evidence, so nothing lands as opinion. Second, the report is yours; an uncomfortable finding delivered privately, with its evidence trail, is the most useful document an institution can hold, because it converts an unknown liability into a defined one.

The Dual Career Environment Audit is a significant engagement, priced accordingly, and the fee is fixed rather than negotiated, because a fee that moves is a judgement that moves. The exact figure is confirmed in the proposal that follows scoping, so the only price you ever consider is attached to a fully defined engagement. Scoping itself is free, in person, and carries no obligation.

You may well not, and that is what scoping establishes. The scoping assessment ends with a one-page recommendation carrying ALC’s honest verdict, and one of the available verdicts is that an audit is not indicated. ALC has no interest in auditing an institution that does not need it, because the value of the firm rests on every report meaning something.

Every ALC engagement is led by its named practitioner, Jon-Pierre Jones, Founding Director and Lead Auditor, whose doctoral research at Loughborough University London grounds the audit method and who is the named author on every report. Methodology is aligned to the Global Internal Audit Standards, with reporting structured to the ISAE 3000 assurance model. All known conflicts are disclosed in writing before each engagement, under ALC’s Independence and Impartiality Policy.

Indirectly, and honestly so. Elite student-athletes sit inside continuation, completion, and progression figures, inside NSS results, and inside Access and Participation commitments, as an undisaggregated sub-population. No regulation requires you to measure this cohort separately. The audit exists because their outcomes move your figures whether measured or not, and the environment producing those outcomes has never been examined. The regulatory frame is context. The felt cost of an unexamined environment is the reason institutions commission the work.

The framework audits the environment, never the athlete. No athlete is assessed, rated, or reported on. Consultation is voluntary, consent-based, and reported in a form that protects every individual. Athletes tend to experience the process as the first time the whole of their situation has been asked about in one place.

Then the audit converts a belief into evidence. Strong provision that has never been independently examined is an asserted strength; an Embedded rating with a documented evidence trail is a demonstrated one, usable with your board, your athletes, and your recruitment market. Institutions confident in their environment have the most to gain from being measured, because they are the ones the benchmark will flatter.