WHEN it comes to motivating students, the Royal Air Force has a pretty good carrot and what must be the ultimate stick. If you’re good, there’s the promise of world travel; if you don’t turn up, you could technically end up in prison.

So you could be forgiven for thinking the forces have it easy when it comes to making sure training gets done. After all, how many colleges have their own police, high-security fencing and armed guards to discourage potential drop-outs?

In fact, this isolation from the civilian way of doing things is precisely what the RAF is moving away from as it tries to make itself more attractive to recruits looking for transferable qualifications. Its education chiefs have decided to join their non-uniformed counterparts and offer Modern Apprenticeships and national vocational qualifications.

“We’ve got a captive audience,” said Flight Sergeant Jonathan Kerswell, of the RAF air movements school at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.

“No, perhaps captive’s not the right word. Let’s put it this way, we don’t need to go to great lengths to prove our attendance figures. If they are not at Colchester (the forces’ prison), then you can presume they are still on the programme. Only joking!

“We have to have discipline but I want them to come in and ask for help. NVQs are about people learning by doing the job and I think the RAF wants that. Two years ago we decided people joining the RAF should get the opportunity to do NVQs. It is something they can show to civilian industry if they leave the air force. We comply with civil aviation standards. There are many aspects which they learn which make them employable.”

From a complex of ageing offices where you could imagine Douglas Bader taking the weight off his tin leg between sorties, Mr Kerswell and his two staff have been bringing this corner of the RAF’s training operation into the modern age. All three are qualified NVQ assessors.

RAF movements staff are responsible for loading and unloading aircraft, including cargo and transport planes, wherever they go - often arriving in foreign hot-spots ahead of the fighter squadrons.

Each aircraft has its own requirements in terms of total payload and distribution of cargo to ensure it remains stable in flight. With the RAF increasingly chartering civil jets for jobs such as troop transport, movements specialists need to know about an ever-broader range of aircraft.

The RAF has long sold itself as a place where you can “learn a trade”. But, though military apprenticeships are still respected, Civvy Street has become increasingly fond of its own qualifications - from NVQ level 1 to the degree and beyond.

So trainees at the RAF school working towards the air force’s own qualifications, now all “volunteer” to sign up for an MA as well.

The Learning and Skills Council will fund this year’s movement school intake of 84 trainees to do foundation MAs for 18 months and most will complete them within this time. Their NVQs include passenger-handling and driving heavy goods vehicles on the airfield.

“We require them to be able to drive various types of vehicle,” said Mr Kerswell. “Some of them haven’t got a driving licence, so we arrange that for them as well.”

Like many of his civilian counterparts, he seems to think schools could do a better job turning out young people ready for the workplace.

“Let’s just say that we find there’s a need to replenish their skills,” he says. “Some have got no GCSEs and some have got nine GCSEs and no common sense.”

Another area where he sees eye-to-eye with the private sector is the need to build up young people’s social and interpersonal skills, an issue which Richard Handover, WH Smith chief executive and the new chairman of the Adult Learning Inspectorate, says trainers need to focus on more than in the past.

“Try telling a group of high-ranking officers that their flight’s not going to be taking off,” says Mr Kerswell. “That takes a lot of self-confidence. So we get them used to public speaking.”

The trainees give presentations in an auditorium, finding themselves, for the first time, performing at a rostrum in front of their workmates and senior ranks.

So, what does a military man make of the FE sector’s passion for paper-pushing? Again, a cautious silence. But he has at least one trick for curbing red tape. Fed up with compiling pages of typed evidence to prove trainees had done engine-checks on an RAF vehicle, the school came up with a neat solution: trainees now simply have their photograph taken, head under the bonnet and dip-stick in hand, with an assessor’s signature underneath.