Electrical Articles
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The 2357 and what it means - 20th March 2010
Expectations by Neil Sambrook - 21st October 2007
What really is happening to our qualification?
Well if you don't know, where have you been for the last 6 months? To shorten the story somewhat, it's pretty simple, it's going to change. Drastically. I am not talking about content, a circuit will always be a circuit; there will always be a potential difference somewhere; there will unlikely be a discovery in the near future that proved Mr Ohm was completely on the wrong tracks. No, we are not talking about content, we are talking about different changes.
The changes at the moment are somewhat difficult to fathom. Summit Skills, the Sector Skills Council responsible for the Electrotechnical framework, are responsible for bringing the course into line with the new QCF qualification list. The QCF is an attempt by the government to standardise and unitise qualifications and structures. Summit Skills themselves are the people that decide on why, what, who and how we currently train future electricians. There is a popular myth that the City and Guilds are always the bad guys when it comes to problems with the qualifications but many times they are tied by Summit Skills as to what they offer. Summit Skills seemed to have become the 'Gods' of Electrical Installation. They are tied in with the industry bodies, ECA being a noted and large supporter. This means that while they are few, they have the influence and ears of many; when they say something, it is said to the right people. This does not necessarily mean that what they are saying is right, especially this time round. Let's take a look at what has been mentioned so far.
There are too many partially qualified people
As of September 2010, no one will be able to become an electrician unless they are on an apprenticeship. Sounds fair perhaps? Should that not be the case? Well consider this scenario: Currently an adult, let's call him Dave, is looking for a change in career. He is a mechanic for a popular and well advertised national company changing brakes and tyres. The pay is poor and the hours are many. Up until now, this hasn't really bothered him, he's been enjoying life and an income that supports this. Dave hits 25 years young, meets a girl and decides this girl is the one. They date, everything is great, they get close and move in together. They still have two incomes, rent is covered, bills are paid and nights out are enjoyed. Dave hits 27, pops the question, she accepts and they tie the proverbial knot. Dave hits 29, is due to be a father, realises that his income really isn't that good and begins to panic thinking he won't be able to afford life on his income alone. He needs a change of career but has no qualifications or experience. He goes to his local college, likes the look of being an electrician, enquires and subsequently enrols on an evening course. It's tough doing two nights a week, but he thinks about the extra £7 an hour he could be earning having a trade behind him so roughs out the journey, balancing work, home life and studies. The tutor explains that this current qualification will not give him graded electrician status but may be useful to get him a job as a mate or an improver. It can give him the technical background to use as a carrot-on-a-stick to employers to take him on and give him that chance. Once working as a mate or an improver, he could actually start and complete the NVQ. Within a couple of years, he could have all the necessary qualifications to work as a fully qualified and graded electrician doubling his previous income. The industry gets a well motivated and mature candidate, skills shortages are being addressed, the correct qualifications are attained (rather than a 7 day domestic electrician course!). Everyone wins. The problem with this wonderful opportunity is that Summit Skills would not record that as a success, it is not an apprenticeship but a series of qualifications strung together. They would record it as a partially qualified person, someone who had completed the technical certificate at college without being apprentices or JIB adult trainees, even though that person could join the JIB Register of Electricians. Under the new Summit Skills scheme, Dave could not become an electrician, he would not have the opportunity. This land that people flock to for opportunity will no longer offer the opportunity.
Now consider the full time student. With a massive decrease in apprenticeships offered by companies over the last few years coupled with the "Credit Crunch©", we have more young people than ever out of work. Lots of these young people still want to be electricians but cannot find the elusive placements. Many of them think that they might want to be electricians but are unsure. Some of them just have no idea what they want to do but didn't get the grades to do A Levels and wanted to do something with their hands. Whatever the reason, the outcomes are very rarely as clear cut as Summit Skills seem to think they are. They say we are turning out too many partially qualified people. What they don't take into account is that many of these students use the qualifications to help them get the apprenticeship in the first place. A lot of employers like taking these students, they are a little more mature, often have driving licenses (useful for rural areas) and a little bit of background knowledge. They can ask the colleges what the students are like, they can ultimately vet the detritus beforehand by simply selecting the best on offer. Other students use the qualification to go on to higher level qualifications and then on to university. Others move to related industries, engineering, electronics and the ilk, all again aided by having a solid level 2 qualification that combined a heady mix of practical and theory.
To say we are churning out part qualified people is simple ignorance of the larger picture, a deliberate avoidance of the facts. If the industry were truly concerned with part qualified people, then the focus would have been on the churning out of domestic electricians after a week long course. They should be concerned that after a week, an individual who has never even worked on a construction site can slap a Domestic Installer sign on their van and go out installing, inspecting and testing electrical work.
What the changes mean to colleges and training providers
Jobs. There are a lot of us in the teaching and assessing game and the majority of us like it thank you very much. I suspect the job is a lot different these days compared to what it used to be, we no longer just teach apprentices, we teach on engineering courses, foundation courses, general construction course as well as traditional adult evening courses and sometimes dipping into Plumbing courses. In fact, for a lot of us, our teaching strengths and abilities have stretched us and now we are probably going to pay the price for it. We may have a group of apprentices in on a Monday but may also have a full time group in on a Monday, Tuesday and a Wednesday. We might then have adults in on a Tuesday and Thursday evening. That would equate to 5 days worth of teaching yet under the new proposals, we would only be able to run the Monday class and no others equating to 1 days worth of teaching. It doesn't take a level 3 lecturer to work out what that means to the shop floor workers, especially with the government slashing more funding than Freddy Krueger slashes teenagers.
We have already seen through the Smartscreen forums and through friends, contacts and anecdotal incidences that people are going back onto the tools. The ill prepared introduction of a new qualification being the catalyst that has pushed them over the edge in an already tight and frustrating education environment. It's took years to persuade people to come into teaching, when the going was good outside, no one wanted to take a wage drop and increase in workload to enter the teaching game. This often meant those that did, actually wanted to, they had an innate desire to make a difference, to impart their knowledge and experience. Those will go leaving the befuddled and downright uninterested behind.
Change is good
It's a bold statement. Is change really good? Well, yes, in the majority of situations it is. Change brings fresh ideas, fresh people, an opportunity to make things better again. It is the force behind improvement which with careful introduction and thoughtful application, benefits everyone, students, lecturers and industry alike.
The problem is that it is looking like this new change is not going to have any of those superlatives attached to it and as history shows, change has not been particularly productive within our industry. Many people sing the praises of the 2360, and content wise, I am sure it was a good qualification. I am one of those that sat the 2360 as a student 20 years ago, all the way up to the "C" certificate and I can tell you that as a student, it really wasn't that great. It's not that the content was bad, it was more of the fact that you sat there for a year pretty much unaware of how well you were doing then all of a sudden, bang, exam. There were few official warnings that you were perhaps going off track and a lot of the less motivated students got frequently caught out. Then came the 2351, put in place I assume because not enough people were passing the written-as-opposed-to-multi-choice 2360 level 2. I really do not need to write anything about the 2351. The introduction of the 2330 in my opinion addressed the progression issues through the course whilst having pretty much the same content as the 2360. Planned correctly, the students have regular external assessments which are good indications of progress and some good, solid, practical assignments. I know that the launch was not without teething problems and there have been some issues, but they have been ironed out and have left a good qualification in its stead which has served us well over the last few years.
Change is bad
We know things have to change, we are after all living in the information age and technology is increasing at an exponential rate. There are new items being invented that the electrician uses daily or installs now that they never would have done ten years ago. This brings new challenges to the industry and the opportunity to use continual training to ensure we have the strongest and most qualified workforce available to us. Change also gives us the opportunity to look at what we offer at the fundamental level, to make tweaks and improvements over what we currently deliver. We shouldn't ignore change as it is a window of opportunity.
The Government want the QCF system to work and have put pretty aggressive deadlines in place to make sure that it does. This means that, once again, we have to accept changes to our qualifications. This is something, for reasons stated above, that should be seen as a golden opportunity. The 2330 and the 2356 are not bad qualifications, they appear to satisfy the industry and keep it open enough that it offers opportunities and progression routes for a wide variety of entrants, but we also know it's not perfect. We should be using this enforced governmental change to look at what is right and what is not so right with the system. We should elicit the utopian ideal of the industry meeting with those doing the training. It would be brilliant, a real opportunity to bring everything together. We are realistic enough to know that this will not really happen but we should also not be using it as an opportunity to destroy what we have worked so hard to produce over the last few years, finding excuses for changes that don't exist and seemingly threatening the skills gap further.
Conclusion
We are all worried about what the future brings. There are a lot of concerns and as Johnny Nash coined, there are more questions than answers. No one is listening though, and even if they are, they don't want to engage us. We hear snippets, rumours, piecemeal information that we cannot discern. Conjecture is running rife, as it does in these situations. A comment becomes the truth, de facto even. All I can think of is the misquoted Churchill line, "Never was so much owed by so many to so few". And it won't be quite in the same spirit.
Expectations by Neil Sambrook
What are our expectations as consumers? This is the question I have been mulling around in my skull for the past two weeks now. As a college or a training provider we sell our products to the general public, but in what way do we actually sell them? We don’t appear to sell a physical product like say perhaps Robert Dyas on the high street do; we sell an experience, the combination of the whole, a package if you will. So how do we compare this package to something else we know? A package holiday may be the obvious comparison. In one convenient cost, we purchase a flight, accommodation and tour rep to cater to our whims and expect a certain level of quality when doing so. If we pay £200 for a fortnight in Majorca, we expect the hotel to be average at best, the rep to turn up once in that two weeks and a crowded flight with no leg room, in fact, anything better than this is an unexpected and most welcome bonus. If we spend £2000 for a luxury week in the Maldives, we expect to be treated like royalty; we expect spacious aircraft legroom, the best food and top class accommodation with a rep that cannot do enough for you. It stands to reason that the more you pay, the greater the expectation of the end product. Our expectations as consumers when paying what we consider to be large sums of money are extremely high, indeed my own are no different.
Then I asked myself, what if I was to buy an LCD television. I have the choice of several models but I narrow it down to two different models, one costing £400 and one costing £4000. What do I expect the difference in product to be for the actual difference in price? Well, I expect both of them to work in so much as I can watch Eastenders equally well on either television (perish the thought). I would also expect the more expensive one to have a much better quality picture, better sound, better build quality and more functions and features to justify spending the additional premium.
So thinking of the two parallels, I have tried to compare them to the expectations placed on us as tutors and assessors in an increasingly demanding industry. The thought process almost immediately got me thinking about my experience at college during my own apprenticeship…
My experiences and expectations at college
We had many different tutors during my stint at college each with their own eccentricities, strengths and weaknesses. I was there for three years in total, the City and Guilds 236 Part 1, Part 2 and finally the C Certificate, all done via block release. Over the three year span, we had eleven different tutors:
- Mr A (Sergeant in the TA, not a great lecturer but extremely respected, strong disciplinarian!)
- Mr B (young tutor, my inspiration to want to teach, very good, lots of personal respect for him despite being a Villa fan)
- Mr G (sitting at the front reading the Regs is not conducive to learning I am sorry to say! People literally fell asleep and snored during the class. Four hours of being read the Regs by a guy with the worst monotonous Yorkshire drone you can imagine should have seen the guy fired out of a large gun into the nearest dole queue)
- Mr R (great motivator and a really nice guy is unfortunately as much as I can say about him)
- Mr Bob M (king of eccentrics, good solid tutor in later years though, despite having an old school approach, we did learn from him)
- Mr H (absolutely no class discipline whatsoever, learnt nothing, lovely friendly guy though, I felt guilty that no one ever listened to him as I suspect we all did)
- Mr B (not much to say, was alright I suppose, no lasting impact or memory)
- Mr F (excellent sketch artist, very poor tutor unfortunately)
- Mr H (mad professor, always way above our level and impatient too)
- Mr M (sorry, learned nothing from you I am afraid)
- Another tutor, forget his name, one lad tried to lift his wallet if I recall, wound him up something chronic all the time they did.
So out of the three years I attended college, there were two tutors out of eleven that were actually worth paying in my honest opinion. As a head of an electrical department and recently being involved in recruitment, I could happily say I would not employ the remaining nine tutors today were they to come to interview. In all honesty, they would never get past the microteach (a short ten minute presentation before the interview). They imparted next to no knowledge and only three of them actually maintained discipline in the classroom. In hindsight, I have no idea how I passed the majority of the course. I suspect that at least eight of the tutors are long retired by now which may or may not be an excuse for the overall poorness of my general tutoring at college.
My experience at college part two
At this point, and through the comments above, you must be thinking that I hated college. You’d be very wrong in that assumption, I absolutely loved college. I am not overly sure why I enjoyed the experience so much but suspect that it was for two reasons, the social aspect and the fact that despite the tutors, I succeeded and did quite well out of it dispelling my previous schooling mediocrity. Out of all the tutors, one really inspired me, a young tutor of approximately 27 years of age who was into modern music, football, girls and everything else a rampant teenager could associate with. He was the reason I entered teaching myself at a relatively young age, I believed I could teach and communicate with the students as well as him and do a much better job than nine out of eleven tutors I had during my apprenticeship.
So what’s the relevance?
Good point, I am getting there, please bear with me. My point is I had no expectation from college or my tutors. I cannot really tell you why not, I just didn’t. School for me didn’t hit anything like the proverbial nail on the head. I came away from school with nothing to speak of in terms of qualifications and maybe this is why my expectations were so low or to be honest, non-existent. The only thing I expected out of college was a certificate at the end, and even then, only if I could be bothered to do the revision and put the work in myself for it.
Ok, ok, so what’s your point?
I suppose what I am getting at is that 18 years later, the people we teach seem to have immense expectations. They don’t expect to have good lecturers teaching them, they expect to have brilliant lecturers teaching them. They expect to be entertained as if we were all as engaging as the latest music/television/film/consoles are to their individual social lives. They expect everything to be delivered to them on a plate in a format that keeps them interested for seven hours a day. They whinge when they have to write anything down, failing at all times to understand the importance of being able to write to complete their apprenticeships and even exist in post adolescent life. They moan about covering Health and Safety despite the fact that most of it is now delivered in innovative and consuming ways; there are an abundance of interactive games and teaching methods being produced. Some even complain when we do practical work, despite the fact that the quality of the practical exercises and the equipment used today is almost infinitely better than twenty years ago. Twenty years ago our consumer unit in the workshop consisted of a connector block to give you a comparison as to how far we have moved on. All this could be compared to teaching styles years ago when a tutor would simply dictate what you needed to know with the expectation on you to remember what you were writing. We were never going to learn from dictation, but it certainly kept the class quiet and occupied. Dreadful practise indeed by anybody’s standards today. But did we complain? Did we go back to our gaffer and say that the (and I quote from a recent comment) “teaching was shit”? We certainly did not, in fact, despite the bad teaching, our end of block tests were sent back to the gaffer and if we underperformed, we were actually called in from site to explain exactly why. One such phase test saw me get about 45%, which was only 2% lower than the next highest in the class (I wasn’t top of the class you know!) and saw me in front of the company director trying to explain that, although it was only 45%, it was actually a very high score compared to the rest in the class. That took an incredible amount of persuading and a promise that the next test would be much better before I could leave his office. In stark contrast, today’s students’ getting such a result would result in the company director ringing the college demanding why his student had such a low score and what we are going to do to improve it. If we don’t improve it, they will send the student to a rival educational provider, ergo taking his business and money elsewhere. That’s the difference between 2007 now and 1989 and my first point about expectation; it has reversed entirely.
I see the same with parents, if a full time student is underperforming then it has to be the lecturer’s fault. Parents’ will look for reasons why their child is underperforming and believe the child without question when they say that the ‘lecturer is crap’ and actually pursue the college to have this ‘malpractising fiend’ replaced by someone who knows what they are doing. The very last thing they will do is question the performance, commitment or desire of the child. Of the two years I have been managing a full time class I have been astounded at some of the parents’ responses, in fact, absolutely speechless as the parent of the most disruptive and badly behaved student on the course last year got his Mother to ring in and complain that we weren’t teaching him correctly after a bad report. It was our fault that the student was behaving badly (and apparently the two schools that he had previously attended and been removed from had extremely poor teachers too) and that we should do something about it or they would be complaining to the Principal. I had call from another parent saying that the student wasn’t learning anything in the class as it was such a disruptive environment to try to learn in. When I investigated, it turned out that the son she was ringing in about was the main cause of the disruption and had been chastised by the lecturer on several occasions.
The truth
In all honesty, I am probably venting some pent up half term frustration as I get another load of student surveys plonked on my desk as part of the tri-annual course review. I see comments on there that are utter rubbish, perhaps the fault of us giving some of these students a voice when some of them fail to understand basic English (and I am not talking immigrants and EU workers here). I get, as electrical co-ordinator, moans and groans about tutors under my leadership. I get questions about their competence, their commitment, their experience, their interest in the subject and everything else you can imagine. These lecturers they are complaining about are the same as all of us; they are electricians trying to put something back into the system and earn a wage. They may not know everything about electrical installation and science or be Superteacher™, but they are really trying hard to adopt new and interesting teaching methods to keep the students attention and increase the amount learning at the same time. They are trying exceptionally hard, with many working 60 to 70 hour weeks just to keep on top of information they themselves haven’t studied in 20 or 30 years. Most of all though, I get angry that no thought goes into the seemingly mindless ranting from many of today’s students. There is no thought about the fact they are destroying the morale of people that are trying so very hard to educate them. Their expectation level, despite the majority of them getting absolutely free training courtesy of the government and the remainder paying about one thirtieth of the average electrician’s salary a year, is extremely high. Too high in fact.
The conclusion
Well, I was going somewhere with this after all. Our expectations in life when talking about buying an LCD television simply cannot be linked to an educational experience. It is the sum of much more than the whole. A mature student expects that his £500 a year to gain a trade qualification is a lot of money and demands premium experiences because of the outlay. It seems that £500 a year to many people wanting to train is apparently extremely expensive. When compared to everyday life, I suspect that the same individual that thinks £500 is a lot of money for a course that will change their life forever, doesn’t think that paying £900 for a plasma television is a lot of money. They may think that the holiday to Majorca costing £500 is excellent value for money but they won’t think to compare this to an educational experience, an experience that really will have an impact on them and their families’ future.
In truth, that £500 a year is merely chicken feed, a token payment, it barely covers the wage demands of the people delivering, administering, registering and running the course they have enrolled on yet alone the amount of material used every year. One course alone, popular amongst private training providers’, costs £200 just to simply register the student with the awarding body. When you actually break down what you get for your money, you realise it is extremely good value for money.
So what do you expect for your money and how much does a quality education actually really cost? Well, when paying the sort of fees that colleges are charging for a course you should put your expectations somewhere amongst the cheap package holiday to Majorca level. You’ll ultimately get your qualification from the course but you need to put in a lot yourself to meet the required level of competence. If you get an excellent tutor, then you can compare this to getting additional legroom on a cheap flight, or an upgraded hotel room for free on arrival in Majorca. When paying some of the rather more exorbitant fees of private training providers, then you can start to expect the level of service that comes from a premium package, akin to that of the two weeks in the Maldives. You have a much greater right to expect a better service when spending £4500 on a course at a private provider compared to £500 at a college.
The real conclusion
Next time you complain that your lecturer didn’t quite get a particular point across, has a strict and disciplinarian approach to class management, wasn’t quite on the ball during today’s lesson or got something wrong in class, remember your expectations and manage them accordingly. The next time you get a survey to complete about your experience on a course, think before filling it out, don’t whinge and complain like so many of us in today’s society seem to want to do today. There are many students who do act and respond in an intelligent way, they may well have important concerns and as long as they approach it in the right way, we as tutors, course managers and department managers will listen and try to act accordingly. We only have the interests of the students at the end of the day.
An electrician willing to enter the teaching game is very hard to find, an experienced electrical lecturer is extremely difficult to persuade to work for you and an experienced and excellent electrical lecturer with a good reputation comes about as often as Halley’s Comet. If out of three lecturers over three years you have one average one, one good one and one excellent one, you are doing extremely well in the scheme of things. If you continue to complain about the trivialities then remember one thing, we may be teaching at the moment, but we are all really just humble electricians under that shirt, tie and name badge, we’ll simply get fed up and go back on the tools, leaving the chancers, the retirees and the downright crap lecturers behind to train the next generation of electricians. Then believe me, you will really have something to complain about.
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