ACA training roles and responsibilities

Use this guidance to ensure that your ACA students are on track throughout their ACA training agreement to become an ICAEW Chartered Accountant. It should also help to ensure you continue to meet the ICAEW training standards applicable to all authorised training employers and principals.

• Ensure that a signed training agreement is in place for all your students.
• Provide your students with at least 450 days of professional work experience (or 300 days where eligible).
• Plan and implement training programmes to allow sufficient range and depth of experience.
• Ensure that all your students are adequately supervised.
• Ensure that counsellors and line managers are familiar with all the ACA requirements (QPRT and PRT only. ATPs cannot delegate responsibility to counsellors).
• Ensure that your students complete all elements of the ACA training process. Learn more about the existing ACA training process for students who start up to 30 June 2025, or read more about the Next Generation ACA training process for students who start from 1 July 2025 or have been switched to this route.
• Ensure that your student’s progress and their online training file is reviewed by you or their counsellor every six months. The first review can take place up to eight months following your student’s start date to accommodate existing appraisal cycles.

Every six months

• Ensure that your student’s online training files are completed on a gradual basis, are reviewed every six months, and that every tab within the training file has been updated by the student following the review. Learn more about six-monthly reviews.

Exams (QPRT and PRT only)

• Select appropriate study programmes.
• Set policies for exam performance, study leave and financial support.
• Implement a system of monitoring study and exam performance, providing support where needed.
• Provide support for the transitional arrangements throughout 2025-2027 where required.

Audit Qualification (if applicable)

• Plan and implement training programmes to allow sufficient range and depth of audit experience.
• Ensure that an appropriate person is formally appointed to sign off audit records. This must be somebody who holds the Audit Qualification.
• Ensure that students performing audit work are adding audit days to their training file in accordance with the regulations (refer to the six-monthly review checklist).
• Determine whether audit work has been competently completed, and confirm this within the training file.
• Ensure that specific feedback is added to the training file, by the formally appointed reviewer, and on a timely basis.

At the end of a training agreement

• Perform the final sign-off of your student’s online training file after the last day of the agreement.
• Exams do not need to be completed at this stage.