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As part of the UK Institute of Coding (IoC), established to address the perceived skills gap between computing graduate capabilities and employer needs, a degree accreditation standard was developed which focused on the demonstration of real-world computing competence rather than on traditional academic knowledge. A graduate’s competence was to be assessed by using a portfolio recording their achievements in a real-world setting to map those achievements to the skills descriptors of a global skills framework for IT professionals. This paper explores the decisions made as the accreditation standard was developed, and the range of tests and checks that were required to ensure that the standard would both confirm graduates’ specific competence and meet national regulatory frameworks for degrees. Although the specific accreditation standard was for computing degrees, the design approach and subsequent validations would apply also to competence-based standards for other subjects.

A long-standing challenge in the treatment of ovarian cancer is drug resistance to standard platinum-based chemotherapy. Recently, increasing attention has been drawn to the use of self-assembled metal-organic complexes as novel therapeutics for cancer treatment. However, high hydrophobicity that is often associated with these structures lowers their solubility and hinders their clinical translation. In this article, we present a proof-of-concept study of using nanoprecipitation to formulate the hydrophobic metal-organic cages and facilitate their use in treating chemoresistant ovarian cancer. The Pt6L4 Cage 1 is an octahedral cage formed by self-assembly of six 1,10-phenanthroline-Pt(II) centers and four 2,4,6-tris(4-pyridyl)-1,3,5-triazine ligands (L). Cage 1 is able to trigger DNA damage and exhibits promising in vitro potency against a panel of human ovarian cancer cell lines. However, due to the large portion of aromatic components, this cage structure has very limited solubility in cell culture media (