Another year, another qualifications review!

The Whitehead Review into adult vocational qualifications reported earlier this month and, like previous reviews, it seeks to address the impact and relevance of training and reduce the growth of unnecessary qualifications. Why do we have so many qualification reviews and why don’t any of them seem to address the issues they are seeking to resolve?

Qualification reviews come along pretty regularly and most have similar aims to increase:

• The take up of qualifications
• The skills of the workforce and;
• The competiveness of UK plc.

There are two problems around qualifications. First, despite the large take-up of qualifications, skill needs remain stubbornly high. Second, in some areas of the economy qualification take up is low and some people believe this impairs the professionalism of certain occupations or industries.

Looking closer to home, the take up of qualifications across the tourism and visitor economy is low. Ten percent of the workforce has no qualifications and only 42 percent has one at level 3 – the level that the government is increasingly focusing on.

Yet, despite the obsessive focus on qualifications, the link between skills acquisition and qualifications attainment is spurious at best. Qualifications have often been used as a short hand for skills and there are obviously many skilled and experienced people with no qualifications. Similarly, having a qualification doesn’t mean a person is skilled.

Since the introduction of competence-based qualifications in the early 1990s, the focus on training and assessment has largely taken a back seat. It goes without saying that it is the training that leads to a qualification that develops the skills employers are seeking. Equally important, the assessment should be sufficiently robust to test the transfer of knowledge and the use (however limited!) of those skills.

Possessing a qualification itself should tell an employer that someone has the relevant skills. This was the case twenty years ago when employers could name the qualifications and had confidence in them; and as a result, specific qualifications were requested in job advertisements. These days are long gone. The stream of qualification reviews means that many employers do not recognise qualifications because they are not around long enough for employers to get used to them. It’s a sharp contrast to what happens on the European mainland, where employers largely recognise the qualifications because they themselves went through a very similar system.

The latest review, like many of its predecessors, is likely to have very limited impact as it lacks bite and doesn’t really address the core issue of training or assessment. On the contrary, Doug Richard’s review of qualifications is likely to have a greater impact.

The creation of professional standards that are set by industry and reflect what someone in a given occupation should be able to do immediately removes the problem of the myriad of qualifications. For the first time it also puts in-house training on the same status as qualifications. Gone is the obsession with qualifications and getting the inputs right; it doesn’t matter because the output is key and meeting the professional standard. These will be independently assessed to determine whether someone has met the standard, regardless of whether they have undertaken a qualification, an apprenticeship or received in-house training.

There is potential to hope that the incessant monotony of qualification reviews will finally come to an end. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Government’s control of apprenticeship standards through its trailblazer rollout and the lack of autonomy for sectors to put in place a system that reflects their needs will mean that the familiar cycle of qualification reviews will be with us for many years to come.