17.11.2008
Operatives and frontline supervisors in food and drink manufacturing will soon be able to achieve new, publicly accredited qualifications, which for the first time in 20 years will mean workplace skills can be recognised outside the NVQ structure.
Employers in all industries will be able to get involved in the design of new, highly flexible, occupational qualifications, aimed at better meeting the needs of employers and the workforce, but food and drink manufacturers are already in the forefront of the reform.
Following a pilot scheme led by Improve, the sector skills council, the first of the new-style qualifications, an Award in Poultry Inspection, is to be rolled out in the New Year. And now, employers are being urged by Improve to join sector steering groups to identify needs for many more new occupational qualifications. Eventually they will be developed for all levels of the workforce, including management.
“In the 20 years since NVQs were introduced they have been the only publicly accredited occupational qualifications most people could aspire to,” explained Jack Matthews, chief executive of Improve. “But in many industries, including food and drink manufacturing, some employers have found that the framework for NVQs has been too rigid and not relevant enough to the needs of their workforce.
“Many workers have valuable competencies that they should be able to have recognised through a publicly accredited qualification, but when you consider for instance that in food and drink manufacturing a Level-2 NVQ, the most-popular benchmark, is equivalent to five good-grade GCSEs, then for a lot of workers this may not be considered achievable.
“Now at last the shackles are off, and we have the opportunity to introduce, in addition to NVQs, a whole raft of new qualifications, which can be designed around competency skills for real jobs, be more accessible and more achievable. They will allow people to complete, perhaps a basic level of qualification at first, and then develop gradually, adding higher levels of competency and recognition by completing increasing numbers of bite-sized chunks of learning that build towards better qualifications.”
Since May this year, Improve has been working with employers on the pilot qualification, a Level 2 Award in Poultry Inspection, which will be launched by Awarding Organisations in January 2009. It comprises a number of chunks of learning, known as Units of Assessment (UoA), which are accredited under a new Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF). Eventually there will be hundreds of Units of Assessment within the framework, each with set credit values that can be combined in flexible ways to make up new qualifications.
Learners who have achieved, say, a Level 2 Award might want to develop their skills by achieving more Level 2 Units of Assessment in different areas of competency, and these can be accumulated to upgrade their qualification to a Level 2 Certificate, which recognises a broader ability in relevant workplace skills, or upgrade further to a Level 2 Diploma, which is likely to be the equivalent of a Level 2 NVQ.
Alternatively, some learners might want to develop to a higher-level of achievement by going on to tackle Level 3 Units of Assessment, which could be combined to make up a Level 3 Certificate or a Level 3 Diploma – likely to be the equivalent of a Level 3 NVQ, or two A-Levels. Apprenticeship programmes in food and drink manufacturing are expected to be rewritten to incorporate a new-style qualification instead of the existing NVQ element.
When employers meet with Improve to prepare briefs for the new-style qualifications, the proposals will then be passed to awarding organisations, which will write the Units of Assessment and design the combinations of units to make up the new qualifications. These will then be approved by Improve, and finally by the newly created Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator (Ofqual) before they are formally accredited and added to the Qualifications and Credit Framework. Further information at www.improveltd.co.uk.
