Whitehall hails ‘increasing’ vocational opportunities

27 March 2008

The Government has claimed that its new vocational qualifications for 14 to 19-year-olds are ‘going from strength to strength’, as it announced thousands of new places.

However, access to the diplomas in construction will be patchy in the short term. Schools minister, Jim Knight, announced last week that 8,332 places on the new construction and built environment diploma would be available for young people from September 2009.

This is in addition to the 4,000 places planned for this coming September. The Government’s aim is to ensure that all young people will have the chance to study diplomas by 2013, which also include a new qualification in engineering.

Construction Skills, the employer-led skills council tackling the industry’s skills shortages, was ‘delighted’ with the approval for 86 groups of schools and colleges. Nick Gooderson, its head of qualifications and standards, welcomed ‘the additional 8,000 potential candidates to the industry’.

‘The diploma has enabled us, for the first time, to work closely with schools and colleges to show that the industry is not just about brick-laying and carpentry.’

The diploma provides training in creating and designing the built environment, including transport and the planning system, and can provide a route into construction trades, or into the professions, including transport planning.

GoSkills, the skills council for the transport sector, is working to make the engineering diploma a route into apprenticeships in transport engineering and maintenance, under development. But some areas of England, including those with the biggest demand for construction professionals, have relatively few colleges signed up to providing them this year or next.

London and the West Midlands are among regions with the biggest demand (Surveyor, 13 March). But only three consortia will be offering the construction and built environment diploma in September in the capital, in Croydon, Ealing and Hackney. One more has been given the green light for 2009, in Waltham Forest.

The engineering diploma will be available in five boroughs. In the West Midlands, the construction diploma will be available in two locations this year, and a further four in 2009. Construction Skills has estimated that rising construction output – predicted to peak in 2012, almost one-third higher than at the turn of the century – requires more than 12,000 extra professionals and technical staff annually.

Gooderson, however, said that the diploma was not more widely available in the short term because ‘the bar was set high for the consortia, to ensure a quality product’. Nonetheless, he said the new qualification would have an impact in the short term. It would provide new craftsmen by 2010 – ‘in time to make a contribution to the Olympics’ – and, at the same time, create a pool of potential new entrants by the professions.

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Whitehall hails ‘increasing’ vocational opportunities

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