The Skills Council
We are the core skills committee for the print industry and we dedicate a lot of time to monitoring qualification standards. Our SQS is partly linked to a big shift in government focus on qualifications. We want to make sure there is a good qualifications system in years to come, but the sheer number of schemes makes this very complex. The government has realised that it needs to make them more specific and work-related and lots of money has been spent trying to achieve this. What we are looking into is a QCF. This involves taking the best of existing frameworks and improving them. However, rather than having defined pathways, we want to create more flexible schemes. We are proposing a host of new qualifications that will be based on the QCF.
These will cover a range of business areas and mean people can train in the areas that are important to them – say, a little bit of litho, screen and some finishing. We are taking qualifications to the next level by creating bespoke qualifications for each individual. The big question is how these will be assessed. The scheme will be made available to certain examination bodies, such as Edexcel, which will be in charge of implementing the quality that can be agreed with the suitable qualification.
Richard Bloxam, Print champion, Proskills
Proskills
The printer
I am the chairman of the Proskills Standards Committee. There are some basic facts that need to be understood about the new qualifications setup. The previous framework only considered full qualifications. What is happening is that a whole new framework is being developed. All the existing qualifications are being broken down into parts. The units already exist within the structure of the full qualifications, but now employees will be able to study them as separate modules.
However, a fundamental issue is whether or not government will provide funding for this framework. At the moment, funding is only available for complete qualifications, but these sometimes take up to four years to complete and employers now often want shorter and more specific qualifications. Awarding bodies are already submitting units for the QCF.
Mark Snee, managing director of Technoprint
Everybody's talking about... bespoke qualifications
<i>As part of its Sector Qualifications Strategy (SQS), Proskills, the sector skills council for process and manufacturing industries, is hoping to develop the qualifications needed in its sectors. The SQS aims to identify who the strategy will benefit, identify the nature of current provisions and the actions to be taken forward. One course of action is likely to be the Qualification and Credit Framework (QCF), which allows employees to build and develop bespoke qualifications specific to their own job. But how will these qualifications be created and assessed?</i>
