An attempt to find out the range of different professional body approaches to course and programme accreditation and approval. Some factual backround for the next QAA Forum in May.
The responses to HERRG and the recent QAA / UKIPG Professional and Statutory Regulatory Bodies Forum meetings both indicated a wide variety of practice relating to the Accreditation or Approval of Courses and Programmes among UKIPG members. Moreover, at the Forum on 18th February there was some support for a possible tidying up of this range of approaches - or at least for an exercise to establish what was the current position.
In subsequent discussion within UKIPG, it was agreed to pilot the use of the 'Surveys' function on the UKIPG web-site to get some standardised information to inform the agenda for the second Forum with QAA scheduled for 20th May. Initially, the 'pilot' will go to FE&HEWP and the Executive Group only.
At the same time, member bodies have been responding to the 'Call for Evidence' from the 'Panel on Fair Access to the Professions'. Several of those questions were rather loosely worded leading to the probabilty of inconsistent data sets. So we have taken this opportunity to ask member bodies to indicate the professional occupations covered by their answers, using the Standard Occupational Classifications (SOC) for Major Groups 2 (Professional) and 3 (Associate Professional and Technical). This exercise simply uses this classification system as it exists - and so as it is used by others, including the National Statistics Office, Labour Force Survey etc. This is not the place to challenge the clasification!
So that the UKIPG Secretary has time to evaluate the results of the survey and put it into useable form for the 20th May QAA Forum, member bodies are asked to complete the SURVEY by 30th April 2009.
Thank you for your help - and please E-mail the Secretary if you have any problems with the functioning of the Survey module on the web-site.