The next meeting of the Construction Leadership Council later this month is due to consider a far-reaching proposal to establish a “Construction Competence Council” that would attempt to wrap the industry’s plethora of training schemes and in-work qualifications in a single framework.
A new Council governing a new approach to skills and training is a key proposal in the 117-page Competence in Construction report, commissioned by the CITB to fulfil part of the Action Plan in the industrial strategy for construction, Construction 2025.
This is not a paywall. Registration allows us to enhance your experience across Construction Management and ensure we deliver you quality editorial content.
Registering also means you can manage your own CPDs, comments, newsletter sign-ups and privacy settings.
The report was written by Pye Tait Consulting, also responsible for a 2011 study on the effectiveness of ‘competence’ card schemes in construction.
According to the CITB, the report aims to “help the industry with its thinking about what competence is and means, and how it is assessed and recorded. As such, it gives recommendations over how that might be governed in the future going forward to ensure that there is consistency of approach with card schemes, qualifications, training, curriculum, and so on.”
It has received the backing of the Health and Safety Executive. HSE chief inspector of construction Philip White is quoted on the press release as saying: “This research report offers the construction industry the building blocks for understanding and agreeing how to deliver a truly competent workforce across all construction related activities.
“We hope the industry will embrace the report and set the agenda for developing its recommendations without delay.”
However, the proposal has not yet been endorsed by any other organisations within the industry. The CITB is now hoping to promote discussion among trade associations, professional bodies and others ahead of the CLC meeting.
The report outlines what it sees as the problems with the industry’s current situation on skills and qualifications, including:
- The need to expand on the current focus on health and safety competence to cover other aspects of job roles;
- The unnecessary complexity, confusion and costs of the “certification and their cards” systems and the frustration it causes to employers;
- The need for more independent assessment of qualifications and training;
- The fact that ‘competence’ is not fixed over time but needs to be refreshed.
But the report does not include any specific proposals on streamlining the multi-card systems that operate for various specialist trades, instead deferring the question of how to reform the system to its proposed new “industry-wide Framework for Competence for the UK construction industry”.
This would be developed by the brand-new “Construction Competence Council”.
The report spells out various options for the structure of the council, which could include representatives of the CITB, the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board, other sector skills councils, card-issuing bodies such as the Construction Skills Certification Scheme, professional bodies such as the CIOB, employer bodies and unions.
The Council’s structure and constitution could be discussed and agreed at an annual, national conference, while the scheme could be funded by a small slice of the fees charged for each skills card.
CM also contacted CSCS, the UK Contractors Group, the NFB and the CIOB to gauge reaction to the radical shake-up it proposes, but all said they had not had sight of it before publication and would find it difficult to comment.
But the NFB’s policy manager Paul Bogle, stressing that he had not yet read the report, said: “We do need to have a clear idea of what competency is, so that we can raise skills and create access paths to construction, and make it more attractive to people coming in.”
