Still here?

Things are busy with a capital F here. We seem to be coping and be on top of the teaching, now it's the NVQ we need to lick. Personally, I have never known anything as convoluted and difficult to follow as the electrical NVQ, whoever wrote it obviously done so behind a desk without any real thought. Combine that with unreasonable pressure from the funding people for targets and you get a rather stressed assessor trying to bridge an impossible gap for the sake of a student.

What are the issues you ask? Well for a start, we take 16 year old kids straight from school and expect them to decipher the complexities of an NVQ Level 3. Thats right, level 3, no level 2, straight in at the deep end. It's the equivalent of completing a GCSE on Friday and being asked to pass an A Level on Monday. The industry is (and perhaps rightly so) refusing to recognise a level 2. This is all fine but the government then refuses to accept the complexities we face and simply drop us in with other NVQs, basically saying an NVQ in let's say for arguments sake catering is the same as an NVQ in electrical.

Now it is not going to take a genius to realise that a catering assessor can visit his trainee at the restaurant and witness safety taking place. What will he witness and record? I don't know, heat, fire, boiling liquids, hygiene, PPE et al perhaps? Now take the electrical assessor (or indeed any construction based NVQ). He visits the site and...hang on, what site? Yesterday the student was in Weston Super Mare, tomorrow he's in Bristol. The day after he is in Poole. What is the student doing? Can we observe health and safety? Well, in Bristol he is using a tower scaffold to put up a light fitting, in Weston he turns up on site and the agent isn't there to let them on and when he turns up they have to go to the wholesaler to get the materials, he gets to Poole and it is a simple Periodic test on a house so very limited and probably not worth recording. And the point is? The student can be anywhere, doing anything at any time. The assessor with his limited time slots cannot say I'll come on Monday and observe you doing a testing and inspection unit when the likelihood of the trainee doing that in the real world is virtually zero. Yet despite this, the funding people say it must happen or we will not pay you.

Bureaucratic and generic nonsense. Lets celebrate diversity and publicly state that all people are different publicly and then completely ignore it with regards to the workforce.

Is it any wonder we cannot recruit?