The approved version is the operating specification

Not a historical artefact of the approval process.

Course documentation submitted for approval describes what the provider undertakes to deliver: the outcomes, the volume of learning, the assessment approach, the entry requirements and the mode. Once approved it is a commitment rather than a description.

Providers routinely file it and then adjust delivery for sensible operational reasons without reference to it. A unit is delivered in a different mode, an assessment is changed, contact hours are reduced when a cohort is small. Each is defensible and collectively they mean the course being delivered is not the course approved.

The practical discipline is to treat the approved documentation as the specification and to check any proposed change against it before implementing. Most frameworks distinguish between changes that require approval and those that do not, and knowing which is which is a five-minute question at the time and a serious one afterwards.

Where a change is material and was made without following the variation process, the useful response is to raise it rather than to hope. Self-identified and corrected departures are a different category of finding from discovered ones.

It is also worth holding the approved version somewhere that the people delivering can actually reach, since a specification held only by the compliance function will be departed from by people who have never seen it.

The other document that must travel with the approved version is the record of what was approved subject to. Conditions attached at approval are frequently satisfied, or not, in the months afterwards, and providers routinely cannot demonstrate that a condition was met because the condition itself lives only in a minute nobody has connected to the course file.