CREST Silver stretches students and enriches their studies. Typically completed by students aged 14+, projects require around thirty hours of work and lead to a body of work. This work could be a written report, video diaries or something else entirely. Suitable coursework (e.g. GCSE Design and Technology) or other project work for work related learning, could be used to achieve CREST Silver.

Tips for project work

Familiarise yourself with the CREST criteria and what's expected at Silver level.

Tips to help your students create a CREST project report:

• Make sure your report has enough detail to show evidence that your project meets the criteria. This is especially important with PowerPoints and videos.
  
• Number the pages in the report. This will help students reference areas of the report when they fill out the checklist in their profile form.
  
• Students should use your own words. We want to hear about their project and what they did. Don’t let students use information copied straight from the internet in the report.
  
• Make sure they list the sources of research information. We don’t mind what format references are in, so long as we can find any sources they used. You might need to help students with this.
  

How assessment works

When your students have completed their project you, or they, need to submit their work for assessment. An assessor will assess the work against the CREST criteria.

If they feel that the work doesn’t meet the criteria, they will provide feedback on what the students need to do to achieve their Awards. You have the option to submit the project again for assessment. We charge £5 per project for reassessment.

Alternatively, the assessor may offer to award a lower CREST level. In this case you can decide to accept the offered award, or work on the project further and resubmit it.

In rare cases, the assessor may feel the work merits a higher award level than the one you entered. In this case you can choose to pay the difference in entry fees and accept the higher Award, or to accept the Award level that you entered.

Awards are awarded at the project level, so either the whole group achieves the award, or none of them achieve it. This is why it is important to include a profile form for each student.

Submitting work for assessment

When submitting your students’ work, you should include a report for the whole project, as well as a CREST Silver profile form completed by each student taking an Award. You can download a profile form template from apply.crestawards.org.

The profile form includes a checklist to help the student show the assessor how they met the criteria in their report. There’s also a section for personal reflection on how the project went and how they might do things differently in the future.

Please make sure all the files are clearly labelled with student names and your project ID.

To enter your students for an Award online, you need to complete the step Upload your work to submit the files for assessment.

Please do not include any personal details other than students' names. If you include a photo make sure you have the appropriate permissions from everyone included in the photo.

Once you've uploaded all the files and completed the other applications steps, you can proceed to payment. Please note that  completing the payment process will submit your project (pending payment) and you will not be able to make any edits to your submission after this. We will assess the project once you have paid the entry fee.

Refer to our article on Uploading your students’ work for tips on handling physical documents, and on zipping files for easy transfer.

View the Student’s Guide for Silver

Have questions about your assessment? Contact CREST Support