29th July 2008, 01:20 PM
I find myself in a cleft stick on this one. I appreciate that many people find the validation process for IFA intimidating and opaque and so therefore do not even attempt to join. However, at present many people who have not had intimate contact with the development of the NVQ system (and mine has only been peripheral, but at least I have had some access to it over the years)are also staring at a brick wall because the details are hard to understand. Plus, the people that the NVQ might assist in applying for IFA membership are not yet members and so have not had access to the information about the development of this project
Personally, I need to actually see how something is actually going to work in practice to feel confidence in it.
There is also another potential problem in my view. The NVQ and the National Occupation Standards (NOS) were not developed in order to meet the validation criteria for IFA. They were developed in order to assess people against specific educational and training criteria. So, this is not knocking the IFA for involvement in introducing the NVQ, which is a good attempt to deal with continuing professional development after people start working in archaeology, but I do have a concern about individuals not submitting a portfolio as part of the validation process. The criteria are different and Validation Committee (VC) has (quite rightly) no control or say over the NVQ assessors. These assessors seem to have the potential to control who gets 'fast tracked' however.
In essence, I'm not happy that VC will pass people on the portfolio element on the say so of someone assessing an individual on other criteria. If nothing else, if the work assessed is of a higher standard than that required and is in a submittable format, then it will be in an easy format for VC to assess rapidly. It doesn't have to be 'fast tracked', it will already be by being of the appropriate level and in an easliy accessible format.
There's my 2p.......
Personally, I need to actually see how something is actually going to work in practice to feel confidence in it.
There is also another potential problem in my view. The NVQ and the National Occupation Standards (NOS) were not developed in order to meet the validation criteria for IFA. They were developed in order to assess people against specific educational and training criteria. So, this is not knocking the IFA for involvement in introducing the NVQ, which is a good attempt to deal with continuing professional development after people start working in archaeology, but I do have a concern about individuals not submitting a portfolio as part of the validation process. The criteria are different and Validation Committee (VC) has (quite rightly) no control or say over the NVQ assessors. These assessors seem to have the potential to control who gets 'fast tracked' however.
In essence, I'm not happy that VC will pass people on the portfolio element on the say so of someone assessing an individual on other criteria. If nothing else, if the work assessed is of a higher standard than that required and is in a submittable format, then it will be in an easy format for VC to assess rapidly. It doesn't have to be 'fast tracked', it will already be by being of the appropriate level and in an easliy accessible format.
There's my 2p.......