Steve Hook reports.

MINISTERS are being urged to intervene in qualification changes which threaten to cause a crisis in the training of Britain’s engineering workforce.

Bold action is needed to “alter the course of the Titanic before it hits the iceberg”, lifelong learning minister Ivan Lewis has been told, in a letter from the National Forum for Engineering in Colleges (NFEC).

It says the removal of funding from City amp; Guilds’ 2000-series of qualifications affects the majority of modern apprentices and will leave them without the chance of progression to higher education or the flexible skills needed to keep them employable.

“An alternative, the National Certificate from Edexcel, is too academic and most of them wouldn’t be able to get through it,” Mike Morris, chairman of the NFEC, told FE Focus. “The new City and Guilds qualification is called the Progression Award, which is pretty ironic because progression is precisely what you don’t get. It gives them the bare minimum needed to achieve the NVQs.

“We need something to be done urgently or we are going to have a crisis in engineering.”

The NFEC wants the 2000-series awards to continue to be funded for a year to allow colleges and employers the time to adjust.

The letter says: “The Progression Awards were originally designed for a limited purpose and are rather narrowly linked to single-skill NVQs. They offer limited access to progression. Nowhere near enough work has been done to satisfy employers by September 2002 that these new products are ‘fit for their intended purpose’.

“What is needed now is a moratorium and bold action to alter the course of the Titanic before it hits the iceberg in September 2002.”

There is frustration among college managers about the way the qualifications system works.

“The qualifications system as a whole is increasingly dysfunctional. Having been tinkered with for years and years, it lacks coherence, rationality and learner focus,” said a spokeswoman for the Association for College Management “We need a fresh and radical policy approach from the centre to review and recreate a qualifications framework. What we have can’t be called a framework. It doesn’t have internal clarity and consistency.”

City and Guilds says the new qualification meets industry’s requirements, but it would be happy to run the old programme alongside it so employers could make their own mind up.

“We support colleges in their call for a one-year extension for funding for the current programmes,” said Chris Humphries, director general of City and Guilds. “I would even go for two years.”

For many colleges, news of the changes came too late for their prospectuses to be amended. Loughborough College says it heard on the grapevine that the majority of its City and Guilds engineering courses had been cancelled. “We’ve even interviewed students for courses which don’t exist,” said one manager.

The change-over has thrown away years of experience in building up a good set of qualifications which met the industry’s needs, according to Don Logan, of BAe Systems. He is responsible for the training of shipyard apprentices in Barrow in Furness.

“It’s not the awarding bodies,” he said. “Its the whole funding system which needs looking at.”