Booking or cancelling your Stage Two assessments
Once you have been signed off from Stage One, you can progress to Stage Two. Stage Two visits are normally booked within six weeks of completing Stage One. We will assign you your Stage Two assessment dates and assessors via email. You will be given at least two weeks notice.
Stage Two assessments will only take place during College working hours, from Monday to Friday, except bank holidays. This is to ensure that we can help if unforeseen circumstances, such as illness, occur.
You cannot choose the order or time of your overarching or direct observation assessments. We will aim to book these as close together as possible, but this will depend on assessor availability. Once the assessment dates are booked, these cannot be changed (unless there are exceptional circumstances).
In exceptional circumstances, email your evidence to education.help@college-optometrists.org or please call 020 7839 6000 and press 1 to speak to the education team. Please do not contact your assessor to change your Stage Two visit.
Cancellations
If you need to cancel a Stage Two visit, you will need to pay a cancellation fee.
We may need to cancel a direct observation at short notice due to local lockdowns, or one of the parties needing to isolate.
If you are exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 ahead of a scheduled direct observation, you must follow government advice on self-isolation and let us know as soon as possible. The main symptoms are:
- A high temperature – this means you feel hot to touch on your chest or back (you do not need to measure your temperature).
- A new, continuous cough – this means coughing a lot for more than an hour, or 3 or more coughing episodes in 24 hours (if you usually have a cough, it may be worse than usual).
- A loss or change to your sense of smell or taste – this means you've noticed you cannot smell or taste anything, or things smell or taste different to normal.
Most people with COVID-19 have at least one of these symptoms.