Making the Grade: The Challenges to Making young people s grades reflect their skills

As per my messages so far, i have been pushing for a way to help NEETs by making qualified assessment part of every youth service, to allow their grades to reflect their skills.

Of course, any new initiative needs research, and having spoken to a number of different charities, they have given me good feedback. The key kind of assessment to help NEETs, is a Competency Based Assessment, to grade them by ability and skill. This i believe is crucial to allowing them to demonstrate their true potential to employers. Most young people work or have worked, and have picked up transferrable skills that we can assess them on, to map out and recognise their prior learning, before these young people are sent on the relevant courses.

There are so many reasons why this matters. First of all, the price of education and training. Education costs money. Each course is an investment and a privilege. So we need to make sure that the education available, goes to the people who need it the most.

Then there is the argument for common sense efficiency. We don’t need to teach people what they already know. Certain organisations leaders know this and fast track their top candidates, to save time and resources.  The same should be done for all people in our workforce: but especially for the disadvantaged young people with talent, who need every skill on display to recruiters, in order to survive the brutal war for talent.

And there is a perfect example of how resources can be wasted when this does not happen. While at High School, (Sixth Form as it was known in England at the time) i took French with a student who really didn’t need to be there. She and her family had lived in France for 5 years and needless to say, her French was word perfect. She could have taken the French exam there and then, and would have passed with flying colours - vraiment as the French would say.

Yet this poor student spent 2 years 'learning' alongside the rest of us, which must have been as mind numbingly boring as being made to learn your ABC s when you’re a librarian. And it wasn’t just her time that was wasted. When we think of the amount of textbooks, soundtracks, field trips, pencils, notebooks and countless other resources used to 'teach' her, it added up to thousands. And how much of this could have gone to teaching someone else who didn’t know French but would certainly benefit career wise from learning a foreign language?

So clearly we should be making sure that talented young people are fast tracked through the system and graded according to the skills they already have, to save them time and resources.

As with all ideas of course, there are challenges. And these are some of the challenges we face so far:

Assessors must always be hired by the businesses or other organisations, to work with the young people they serve. This usually means funding is needed and assessment comes, "with a price attached" according to one source.

Sadly the assessors can t work as part of an existing team such as social services, without specific funding, which may be difficult to justify and acquire. For one thing, I am told that Government funding that existed for competency based assessments in UK workplaces is no longer available.

While some courses do allow an exam for candidates who are at the right level, it still happens, that in most cases, young people must be sent on and complete a course before they are assessed. And again, funding such courses may not always be an option.

Each training centre must apply for each individual accreditation, to be able to award that grade to a young candidate. For example a training centre would have to apply to the awarding body for customer service, to be able to assess a candidate and award them that certificate. The awarding body would then send an assessor of their own, who was qualified to award only that certificate. The whole process would have to be repeated again to award the same candidate a certificate in another skill, such as Manual Handling.

And like the old CRB system for criminal records checks, (used before the current Disclosure and Barring Service came in), each awarding body has its own criteria that a training centre must meet to be able to award that qualification.  Given that there are around 170 different skills to be assessed on in the UK alone, this makes it impossible for one trainer to award certificates for several different skills to the same candidate at once. This makes  one full assessment of a candidate’s many skills all but impossible.

And when grades are awarded, the awarding bodies need evidence of time spent either training or learning: ie x number of hours study or a minimum of 10 hours per week working in a particular skill. This does not help NEETs who are unemployed, or who have ungraded skills different to the role they are working in.

So based on the challenges so far, here are my recommendations for moving the process forward:

- Using the new DBS certificate system and the old Investors In People status as as an example, there should be one UK-wide accreditation system, merging all awarding bodies into one federation of sorts, which could award competency based skills in all subjects. This would ensure that for example, being a QCF Accredited training provider would allow a training centre to award all types of QCF applications, without having to apply for each one individually. Like DBS it would make the system more efficient, and allow all information on one individual to be kept in one place: but in a positive way, to help NEETs careers.

- Training providers could be defined as single organisations, co-operatives, or accredited individuals. This would allow charities and assessors to work together, and make arrangements for one assessor to work for several charities at once, to assess and qualify the young people in their care.

- More funding could be given to hire assessors for competency based assessments of young service users in youth organisations who support young people not in education or training.

 For example a Government sponsored social services fund for the purpose of employability could include this kind of assessment as part of its work programmes. Some schemes do exist but are discretionary and rely too much on local initiative. Of course this is a matter of policy, and should the Government not be inclined to do this directly, a charity could be set up to get the funding for this.

Conclusion

All young people s grades should reflect their skills: especially NEETs who must be compensated for their disadvantage by being allowed to demonstrate their actual skillset and prior learning. Competency based assessment is the most effective way to make sure of this. We must now face the challenges and find a way to give disadvantaged young people the same recognition of value as their student and apprentice counterparts, to ensure that they get the best opportunity for a good career.