The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is drawing up plans to asses business training provision.
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), the government body regulates that the public examination system, is preparing to vet the private market in business training. Mary Curnock Cook, the QCA's general manager for workforce development is quoted in the Financial Times as saying that some of the £23bn business spends each year on training is wasted. She thinks that the QCA could add value to private business training.
The Financial Times (FT) quotes Ms Cook as saying "companies and individuals are spending on [training], and people want it. We [the QCA] could develop assessment and quality control around training provision. We could quite quickly pin down the areas most used and most popular and bring those into the system. We need a framework for recognising achievement."
In her previous job as chief executive of the British Institute of Innkeeping Ms Cook demonstrated a simple approach to the confused and sometimes contradictory battery of qualifications. She offered the innkeepers a clear and attractive set of qualifications that they want to take, with certificates they would be proud to hang up behind the bar. "We got a successful portfolio of qualifications mainly by being very, very market-led," she said.
This latest effort to shape up the national framework of vocational qualification is at the behest of the government's skills stategy white paper, issued last summer. The white paper makes the case that you can't properly address the problems of an underskilled workforce unless you present it with a clear map of worthwhile qualifications.
The QCA plans to break vocational qualifications down into a system of credits, which would show how much time an employee or job applicant had spent studying in one area as well as what level of expertise they had reached. New qualifications introduced from next year onwards will be structured in this way, with the whole system of vocational exams transfomed by the end of the decade.
