Licensed Higher Nationals
If you’re a Higher Education Institution (HEI) looking to expand your offer to levels 4 and 5, Pearson provides the opportunity for HEIs to widen participation and strengthen the ladder of learning through the licensed HN agreement, whilst allowing institutions to have 100% ownership of quality assurance, assessment and certification.
About Pearson Licensed Higher Nationals
The Pearson Higher Nationals under licence is an agreement enabling HEIs in the United Kingdom or internationally to offer Higher National qualifications and Higher Technical Qualifications (HTQs)* under licence and use the Pearson trademark ‘Higher National’.
* You can deliver Licensed HTQs under our IP licence agreement. You can read more about delivering Licensed HTQs, along with our FAQ guide below. Please note that HTQs can be offered in England only.
Licence types
Pearson offers two types of license agreements to HEIs, including the Pearson Intellectual Property (IP) License Agreement, and the Pearson Trademark (TM) License Agreement.
Universities may wish to use the new BTEC (RQF) Higher Nationals qualifications, including Higher Technical Qualifications, in their entirety and offer them as their own validated awards. The aim of this IP License Agreement is to protect the use of Pearson’s intellectual property in the awards, and which specifies that the content cannot be used for any other purpose.
Universities will be responsible for the validation, quality assurance, awarding and certification.
The Pearson Trademark Licence enable HEIs to design, validate, deliver, and award their own Higher National qualifications.
Higher National programmes delivered under the TM Licence must map to the core content of BTEC Higher National programmes, where in place. The aim of this design principle is to preserve recognition from employers and professional bodies.
Centre guide
Find out more about delivering Higher Nationals and HTQs under our license agreement.
Our partners
Find out more about the universities we work with to deliver Level 4 and 5 Higher Nationals and HTQs.
Becoming a partner
See our step-by-step guide below to find out how you can become one of our licensed HEI partners.
Licensed HTQs
You can deliver HTQ approved Higher Nationals under our licence agreement.
Key documents
Our Annual Institutional Review Reports (IRR) provide a summary of courses offered under licence including trends in recruitment and achievement, and good practices shared by all providers and future strategy for courses under licence. This allows us to monitor and support each HEI to meet their individual needs to achieve their strategic goals. It also supports all our partner HEIs to look at the trends and practices from other providers and apply them to their own institutions where relevant. You can read our recent report below:
- Annual Institutional Review Report (IRR) 2022/23
- Annual Institutional Review Report (IRR) 2021/22
- Annual Institutional Review Report (IRR) 2020/21
Support
There are different ways we engage with customers and offer opportunities to engage with us. These include:
Regular check-ins
As part of our ongoing partnerships, we offer all our HEIs regular check-ins to discuss ongoing strategy and support required to resolve any problems. These can be regular, or on an adhoc basis, as per the needs of each partner.
Quarterly newsletters
We share the latest news and updates via our quarterly newsletter. If you would like to receive this newsletter, please contact us at licensehn@pearson.com to subscribe to our mailing list.
Our dedicated Customer Services Team is available to support centres delivering Higher National qualifications under licence. For any queries relevant to the License agreements and its related content, please contact the License HN team via email at licensehn@pearson.com.
For any other queries, please see the support documents below. If you have any further questions regarding operational issues, such as registration (EOL), invoicing, etc, please contact us via our customer support portal.
The Pearson Licence Agreement for International HEIs enables them to validate, deliver and award their own Higher National Diplomas (HNDs) and Higher National Certificates (HNCs) under IP licence only.
The benefits of using the Pearson licence agreement include:
The Higher National qualifications are validated and awarded by the HEI, so the university has control of the quality assurance procedures
- HEIs use the entire content of the new BTEC (RQF) Higher Nationals qualifications in order to offer them as their own validated awards*
An HEI can strengthen, or develop, new collaborative arrangements by working with local partner colleges to deliver its validated and approved licensed Higher Nationals
HEIs are able to offer progression routes to their own degree courses
The recruitment and achievement of Higher National students can help to meet the vision for widening participation and access to Higher Education
*HEIs who want to use the qualifications content will be asked to sign a Pearson IP Licence Agreement protecting the use of Pearson’s intellectual property in the awards. This specifies that the content cannot be used for any other purpose.
HN Flex modular delivery
Explore modular Higher National and HTQ delivery with HN Flex under license.