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WHAT ABOUT THE WORKERS?

5th December 1996
Page 43
Page 43, 5th December 1996 — WHAT ABOUT THE WORKERS?
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

• When the Government began planning its new system of vocational qualifications in 1986, one of the main aims was to offer training—as well as nationally and internationally recognised vocational qualifications—to a higher proportion of the workforce. National vocational qualifications (NVQs) and their Scottish counterparts (SVQs) were introduced in 1988. It was hoped that NVQs would help the UK compete effectively with Germany, France and Italy in the European vocational skills league tables. NVQs and SVQs are based on occupational standards, produced and monitored for the haulage industry by the Road Haulage & Distribution Training Council (RHDTC). These standards, in turn, have been determined by the industry's employers and set out the degrees of skill a person requires in order to be judged competent at a particular task. Therefore NVQ/SVGts are skills-based rather than knowledge-based.

Candidates also need to have their competence assessed while performing their job, through work experience, rather than in the academic air of a classroom under controlled conditions. This is radically different to the traditional, examination-based approach to qualifications.

Under the traditional system, more practical occupations have been seen as unskilled purely because they are not performed by people with degrees, A-levels and so on. The NVQ/SVQ system, however, recognises that these jobs require specific skills. It provides a means of measuring these abilities—something the traditional system could never do adequately—and raising these occupations to their rightful status within the UK economy.


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