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The UK educational assessment landscape is changing, characterised by attempts to create more flexible pathways through learning. This has led to attempts to formalise the comparative relationships between different general and vocational qualifications. The National Qualifications Framework (NQF), the Framework for Achievement and the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland all seek to explore the potential for comparing the value of different qualifications. These initiatives mirror other international trends, such as the implementation of the Australian Qualifications Framework. Grading is a potential enabling tool for comparing different qualifications. This is visible in the way that the NQF uses General Certificate of Secondary Education grades C and D to discriminate between Levels 2 and 3 of the framework. This article focuses on the challenges posed for competency-based qualifications in the light of such national and international moves towards developing unified qualifications frameworks. This is important given the strong traditional relationship between competency-based qualifications and binary (pass/fail or competent/not yet competent) reporting and its historically ambivalent relationship with grading techniques. The article also discusses some of the particular issues that are relevant when competency-based assessments are graded. © 2008, UCU.

Fifteen years ago further education (FE) colleges in England were removed from local education authority (LEA) control and re-formed as ‘FE corporations’. Now, it is proposed that, from 2010, local authorities will become re-involved in the running of FE. Given such a prospect, this article takes the opportunity to look back at colleges under LEA control and to critically consider what many FE teachers regard as a golden era: a time which was certainly one of less pressured and more stable circumstances. Whilst this article does not attempt to justify any of excesses that have characterised FE since incorporation, it is recognised that there is a temptation to view FE's past through rose-tinted glasses. It is argued that, despite the turbulent environment in which colleges now exist, the era of LEA control should not be romanticised and that, in the past, FE was highly variable and flawed in many ways. In exploring this argument this article reviews four inter-linked themes related to LEA control: local authority governance; the role of college managers; the position of FE teachers; and the service provided to students. It highlights some of the shortcomings and problems of LEA control and argues that the future role of local authorities in FE should not be viewed as an opportunity to turn the clock back to a bygone era. It should be seen as a chance for a fresh start rather than as a step back in time. © 2008, UCU.

Employability is a widely used in term in the labour market lexicon. Yet there is no consensus on how the concept should be applied and a fog of ambiguity surrounds the term. Making employability 'work', however, is essential not only for younger people to access and sustain work but also for addressing skills shortages that plague many developed economies. This article positions the employability concept in relational terms and highlights the importance of effective information flows across the various labour market stakeholders. Employability is a shared outcome and responsibility even though individuals' skills and knowledge is the foundation of employability. Empirical data from a major New Zealand labour market research programme is used to support contentions. © 2008 A B Academic Publishers.

Training posts in primary care or hospital practice settings provide rich learning opportunities for trainees. Trainees will appreciate and benefit from support for their learning in the clinical setting, exposure to modern teaching methods and constructive feedback. Planning is very much at the heart of productive learning: both planning for single teaching episodes and planning on what should be achieved overall during an attachment.

Objective: The object of this study was to establish what residents in 1994 and 2003 characterised as an ideal clinical teacher and whether differences existed between residents' views in 1994 and 2003. Study design: Setting: postgraduate medical education in the Netherlands. Subjects: 207 obstetric-gynaecologic residents. Intervention: open-ended questionnaire. Analysis: qualitative data analysis with two coding dictionaries based on current literature. Differences between 1994 and 2003 were estimated using the Chi-square test. Results: Residents preferred the 'person' role both in 1994 (42%) and in 2003 (48%). The 'physician' role was significantly more important in 1994 than in 2003; the 'supervisor' role was significantly more important in 2003 than in 1994 (p < 0.05). Seventy percent of the comments related to 'direct interaction' (i.e., between residents and clinical teachers), 30% to 'indirect interaction' (i.e., clinical teachers' behaviour affecting residents indirectly). Conclusion: The data showed that almost half of residents' comments described 'person' role characteristics. There was a significant shift in the role ranked second, from the physician role in 1994 to the supervisor role in 2003. The findings highlighted that teachers, in order to be perceived as ideal, should adapt their behaviour to residents' learning needs. © 2008 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Teenagers who have failed to become apprentices in trade or industry are still required to attend school up to twelve years of schooling in Bavaria. In the last years the number of these adolescents without apprenticeship increased. Most of these adolescents come from families with low socioeconomic backgrounds and did not gain a good school leaving certificate. They are required to attend vocational schools. The following study attempts to clarify the situation of the adolescents without apprenticeship. The students were asked for their opinion about the lessons and the education they receive at the moment. Furthermore, they are compared to apprentices from the same vocational school with a standardised mental health screening instrument, the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire. Results indicate that the students without apprenticeship show more-than-average levels of problems. Hence, it cannot surprise that teachers find it difficult to deal with these students. It might be worthwhile considering the inclusion of social workers and psychological experts to support teachers as well as their students to alleviate the problems of adolescents without apprenticeship. © 2008 Schattauer GmbH.

The preservation of the apprenticeship system in the Australian construction industry contrasts with its decline in Britain over the last three decades. This decline is conventionally ascribed to changes in industrial structure, specifically a decline in the role of the public sector, intensification of subcontracting and growth of self-employment. Given that the Australian construction industry has undergone similar structural changes to those in the United Kingdom, this difference in outcome requires explanation. This article suggests that the contrasting outcomes are the result of institutional differences in the organization of the training system, employers and labour between the two countries. These institutional differences are, however, diminishing as arrangements for training and industrial relations in Australia are increasingly fashioned in the likeness of the United Kingdom. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2008.

Working in communities is increasingly a feature of UK (United Kingdom) higher education. Within the last decade communities of practice (CoPs) have migrated from organisational development departments and evolved to become tools for practice based learning in educational settings. More recently, in nursing, the literature reports that CoPs have the potential to blend the skills of both academics and clinicians to transform and create new knowledge that is both scholarly and applicable to practice. Copyright "2008 The Berkeley Electronic Press. All rights reserved.

This article investigates teaching as collective work. The goals, functions and forms of teachers' collective work and changes in the professional representations or repertoire of actions through collective activity are identified. A synthetic framework is outlined and shown to be useful in addressing the data, by revealing the importance of interactions in professional competence acquisition. The article relates this framework to data collected from new teachers in the induction year in Scottish secondary schools (age range of pupils 11-18 years) and discusses the relationship of collective work to competence standards. Some issues for teacher educators and further research questions are identified.

The EU objective - to become a knowledge-based society, can be realised only through an educational system that respects the principles of Life-Long Learning (LLL). The system of recognition and validation of all kinds of knowledge, without regard to how it has been acquired, is congruent with these principles. To be effective, the system for validation must be developed and performed with the cooperation of all interested parties: government, educational institutions, employers and employees. There are at least three parties that should be particularly interested in cooperating to perform the system of validation of non-formal and informal learning in the higher education (HE) area, i.e., employers, HE education institutions and individuals. This article focuses on the part of employers. © 2008, Inderscience Publishers.