QCA Report Cover

Implementing the Qualifications and Credit Framework (QCF) Nine provider case studies

June 2010

QCDA/10/4976 Preparing for the Qualifications and Credit Framework

Contents

Gloucestershire College...... 3

Highbury College...... 5

Hull College...... 8

Loughborough College...... 10

Newcastle College...... 12

North Hertfordshire College...... 15

North Lindsey College...... 17

Petroc...... 18

Walsall College...... 19

Gloucestershire College Gloucestershire College is well advanced with its plans to implement the new QCF – not least because it has its own in-house QCF champions, Sue Steed and Janette Dalby. Sue, the college’s director of innovation, welcomes the flexibility the QCF will offer to learners and employers once national funding issues surrounding units and inspection measures are resolved. She has been working with colleagues at all levels to ensure the college is ahead of the game when the QCF is ready to be fully implemented.

'The QCF will enable us to offer flexible programmes for learners,' says Sue. 'This includes the adult market and employers who are looking for flexible provision to fit in with their family commitments and with the needs of their business'.

'There will be benefits for the younger age group, too. We’ll be able to put all the qualifications on an electronic learner record so that any units completed will be valued and recognised. Employers will be able to see everything a person has done throughout their education, which will give them a good sense of how that learner approached education.'

Gloucestershire College’s task has been made easier because parts of the organisation already embrace unitisation. This is a key part of the QCF, enabling learners to study for units that can be aggregated or transferred between qualifications to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort. Learners’ previous studies can be expressed as units and given a value that counts towards other qualifications they wish to take at Gloucestershire College.

'If a learner has done a catering qualification, for example, they might have a health and safety unit and a hygiene unit,' says Sue. 'Under the QCF, we can input a query and ask the system where those units would fit into another qualification. We would know that they had already done two units out of a different qualification so they wouldn’t need to do them again.'

The benefits come with challenges, of course.

'There is a huge learning curve for parents and employers to understand the new structure,' says Sue. 'We need to decide how we inform parents and learners and all our partners about how things are changing.

As QCF champions, Sue and Janette spent three days with other organisations checking that they knew all they needed to know and were up to speed with the latest developments on the QCF.

'We’ve been heavily involved in the QCF at Gloucestershire College,' she says. 'There has been a huge impact this year. We’ve spent most of our curriculum development money on developing the new product. We’re a college that likes to be in the forefront of what’s going on and likes to be well informed, so we got all the managers together for development days and mapped our curriculum to the new standards and Foundation Learning.'

'We’ve networked and shared with other curriculum managers, and brought people in from different awarding bodies so we could ensure we were really up to speed with what’s going on.'

Sue says the college is looking at its quality assurance processes to see how they can respond more quickly to the demands of the more flexible framework.

'As the greater flexibility comes on board, we will have to develop initial advice and guidance. Our staff in Student Services will need to understand how they are going to mix and match the units, and we’re considering how we need to change our marketing strategy because we are marketing a different product with personalised learning.'

So what advice can Sue offer other colleges?

'Think about the QCF broadly and get people like the student services team, the marketing team, the exams department, governors, senior managers and the support areas of the college together,' she says.

'It's important because quite often the support areas are left out of the loop. Think what your business consultants are going to tell employers. We got the Connexions people together to deliver awareness-raising sessions, as you also need to consider both where learners are coming from and the advice people are giving to ensure the information is as seamless as possible. Doing that has also strengthened our relationship with those external agencies.'

Highbury College Highbury College in Portsmouth has an advantage when it comes to implementing the QCF. The QCF system requires colleges to offer unitised courses – broken down into units of achievement – so learners can build up credits at their own pace and even transfer them between qualifications.

But that’s exactly what Highbury College has been doing for years, says Deborah See, the senior manager in charge of implementing the QCF there.

'The QCF system is fantastic in principle,' she says. 'It has the potential to be very responsive to the needs of individuals and is a move towards personalisation. We’ve always offered unitised provision at Highbury College, so we have a lot of skills, we have experienced staff and we’re already involved in it.'

Highbury is also unfazed by the QCF’s requirement to give students a unique learner number and keep an electronic learner record of their achievements.

'We’ve been using unique learner reference numbers for some time, so we’re already used to recording unit achievement,' Deborah says.

'QCF could be fantastic for colleges, because every learner will have a transcript of their learning record. That could really streamline the collection of qualifications at entry and support the accreditation of prior learning.'

Deborah is full of praise for the flexibility that the QCF is designed to offer to both learners and employers. She says the chance to build up units will be particularly advantageous to young people not in education, employment or training and other disadvantaged groups like those with mental health issues who may find it intimidating to do a whole programme.

'We can take the units that meet an employer’s needs and design a programme of units that would help employees work towards the qualification,' says Deborah. 'The flexibility is very useful for a college like us that’s looking to widen participation.'

Highbury, like other further education colleges, will not see the full benefits of the QCF until more of the vocational qualifications it currently offers become available as QCF qualifications.

But Deborah is looking forward to that day and working hard on the preparations – just as you’d expect from a college with a success rate that puts it in the top 10% of general further education colleges in the country.

'We’ve moved to some of the QCF qualifications already, and staff are very positive about the possibilities the QCF could bring,' she says. 'There is lots of scope, and it’s potentially quite a significant benefit to the college’s offer.'

With more qualifications due to move to the QCF by December 2010 – funding and awarding bodies permitting – Highbury is doing a lot of the preparatory work and organising training for staff. So how is Deborah planning to make this work?

'We’re taking a whole-college approach,' she says. 'Everyone will have to have a good working understanding of the QCF and its possibilities. We’ve developed a whole-college curriculum model for the new qualifications and we believe this will be a very useful approach to providing flexible personalised learning opportunities, long-term.

'We’ve also done a lot of work on introducing a flexible curriculum and contributing to the framework for Foundation Learning. We’re looking at what was traditionally our applied academic and vocational offer for students aged 16 to19 moving provision into the four national priority pathways for this cohort.'

And the shift to the QCF is hardly a mere paper exercise.

'We’re not just going to re-badge courses but will be having a very close look at what’s of benefit to local people,' says Deborah. 'For employers, we have to look at the needs of the region.'

Developing the infrastructure to support a more flexible framework is a strategic issue that Highbury is tackling head-on.

'We’ve mapped all our curriculum pathways, so all staff in the college are informed of these. We’ve looked across the organisation and identified responsibilities for progression based on the student journey. Our progression strategy identifies the roles and responsibilities of academic and business support staff in enhancing students’ experiences and supporting progression to further study or work.

'We’ve been planning for it over quite a period of time. It was a good strategic decision to be involved in the Foundation Learning trials nationally. In Foundation Learning, we’ve seen an improvement in the types of qualification offered at that level through the introduction of the QCF. There is a good balance towards skills for life, employability skills and vocational skills, and we can see some interesting new qualifications.'

A good part of Highbury’s approach has been to look at ways of streamlining processes.

'We’ve centralised quite a lot of things,' says Deborah. 'Our student information and guidance team are now doing all the initial interviewing at level 1, so that takes a burden off academic staff and frees up their time.

'And we are looking at how we can increase the involvement of the information and guidance team in the interview process at levels 2 and 3.

'This is a development opportunity that will benefit staff and prospective students, as business support staff will gain a greater understanding of unitisation and credit accumulation at a range of levels across the college’s provision.'

Hull College Hull College is making huge strides in its preparations for the QCF and is refusing to let uncertainty over funding and availability of qualifications get in its way.

'The benefit of the QCF is its ability to record small chunks of learning and build qualifications incrementally. It fits in very well with an individual’s learning plan,' says Gary Warke, the college’s deputy chief executive. 'In a city like Hull where we have challenges with young people and learning, being able to have small chunks of learning that can be accredited is very welcome. Our ability to offer a unitised curriculum will help learners build a broad portfolio of learning that is widely recognised and can be taken anywhere.'

While many colleges are concerned about funding for units and the number of units being offered through the QCF, Gary says Hull is making all the preparations it can and will simply work with what’s available from September 2010.

'I’d be naive to say the QCF isn’t presenting substantial challenges,' he says. 'One of the key things is the fact that it’s been very slow to get all the qualifications approved to the new framework.

'The funding streams aren’t agreed yet, so there is a degree of uncertainty. But we’re expecting a statement soon of what’s going to be available through the QCF for September 2010, and that’s something we welcome.'

Hull’s preparations include piloting programmes on community provision, having two senior managers complete the QCF Champions programme, using the QCF Action Planner produced by the Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS).

'I’ve been steering a group within the college and using the LSIS self-assessment tool to prepare the college for moving forward to the QCF,' says Gary. 'We’ve done training sessions with governors and the senior team, we’ve undertaken significant training with staff across the college, and we have bulletins that go out regularly, alerting all staff to what the QCF means and what it’s all about.

'The deputy principals of many of the 157 Group1 colleges in the country have got together to tackle different strands of preparation for the QCF as part of a LSIS collaborative bid. That’s been very helpful, and we will be disseminating what we’ve found around the regions.'

The college has discovered a lack of awareness among employers and others about the changes that are coming in, so it will be doing further work on external communications, he says.

The best advice he can offer to other colleges, he says, is to use the LSIS QCF Action Planner (see link below) as a tool to explore all aspects of implementation and to continue to share experiences with other colleagues in the sector.

Click on QCF action planner

1 The 157 group represents 28 of the most influential Colleges in the FE sector, formed in 2006 in response to paragraph 157 of Sir Andrew Foster’s report on the future of further education colleges in which he argued that principals of large successful colleges should play a greater role in policymaking.

Loughborough College Loughborough College is gearing up for the QCF with a whole-college approach designed to maximise the benefits the new system promises to offer learners and employers.

Jan Leivers, Loughborough’s assistant principal in charge of curriculum and standards, says the college can see the potential in the QCF and looks forward to the time when the national issues of funding and qualifications approval are resolved.

'The problem we have is that many of the qualifications we are using have not yet made it across to the QCF,' she says. 'But long term, the QCF has huge potential.'

Jan believes that the QCF could provide stepping stones for learners.

'People will be able to learn at a pace appropriate to them, so the QCF offers a much more flexible curriculum for learners and means we can offer employers a much more flexible accredited route. It’s a useful approach as we move forward, particularly in apprenticeships, as we are aware that it can offer additional stepping stones for levels 3 and 4. The scope and potential of what it will enable people to do is quite significant.

'Its use in Foundation Learning, particularly with people who are unemployed or want to change direction, is also potentially significant. This could allow us to give them tasters.'

Jan believes the QCF has particular benefits for 16- to 18-year-olds.

'School leavers who have already been accredited with some units will be able to add on building blocks and continue learning here,' she says.

Benefits are one thing. Preparing for the QCF is another. But Loughborough’s experience so far has been highly positive.

'We have accessed the QCF Readiness Provider Support Programme and, as the result of a couple of meetings with a consultant, we have developed an action plan,' says Jan. 'It covers leadership and management, quality, curriculum planning, teaching and learning, information, advice and guidance and management information systems.

'That’s given us a to-do list. We’ve identified a QCF champion who is a curriculum manager – and that’s been handy because it’s provided key updates for the college. We’ve briefed the executive, managers and curriculum team leaders, and we will be sending out a curriculum and standards newsletter that will brief all our staff.

We’ve also had a discussion in the curriculum management group about the potential of the QCF and the broader experience it will allow us to give learners.'

So what advice can she offer other colleges about getting to grips with the QCF?

'The action plan process is really useful because it’s about action planning for a whole- college approach,' she says. 'It’s not just about curriculum planning but it’s about engaging with support services, too, such as student services, on information, advice and guidance, the management information system and exams. Go for a whole-organisation approach, and look to all the people who are going to be involved in that process.'

Newcastle College Newcastle College is making full use of technology to help staff get to grips with the QCF.

'We devised a tracker spreadsheet that identifies current and next year’s provision so staff know where their awarding bodies are with the transfer and progress of qualifications from the National Qualifications Framework to the QCF,' says Lynne White, the college’s director of projects.

'We asked staff to liaise with their awarding bodies to see when QCF qualifications were coming on stream. This helps us ensure these are adopted as they appear on the National Database Accredited Qualifications (NDAQ) and are approved for funding by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC)2. We have a contingency plan, where there isn’t a QCF qualification the LSC said current qualifications be funded in the short term until their QCF replacement has been accepted on to the NDAQ and fundable.

'We also have a QCF site on the intranet, accessible to everyone, where we are building up information as it becomes available. If staff can’t get the answer to their query there they can come back to me and I will follow through on their behalf.'

With a reputation to maintain as the best-performing further education college for 16 to 19 achievement and attainment, Newcastle has been working hard to ensure the whole college embraces the QCF as it is phased in.

'We secured buy-in from senior management so we could take a whole-college approach and get everyone involved,' says Lynne. 'We started out with a small steering group and identified what we needed to do. 'We’ve had one person trained as a QCF champion, and a colleague and I have been involved with the LSIS KPMG World Class Skills response programme for people unemployed for at least six months.

'We’ve approached the QCF from quite a number of different angles, so we have a good understanding of it. The basic concept of the QCF is quite straightforward but you do have to identify a strategy for how you’re going to implement it.' 'We’ve included marketing as well as information, advice and guidance advisers and call centre staff, because one of the big issues is ensuring all front-line advisers are up to date so they are confident and have a good general knowledge of the QCF.

2 The LSC was replaced by two successor organisations in April 2010 the Young People’s Learning Agency and the Skills Funding Agency

'We did awareness-raising for managers right across the curriculum teams with the expectation they would cascade the messages down to their staff. We are also in the planning stage of rolling out a continuing professional development (CPD) programme that will deliver different levels of knowledge to staff depending on their role.'

Lynne says the ability to build up credits and transfer them between qualifications will allow people to broaden their skills without having to go back and take another full qualification, depending on the rules.

'Credit transfer and accumulation within the QCF will be possible, which means that where a learner has been awarded credit for some units within one qualification they may contribute to the new qualification. Long term, it will contribute to some more efficient timetabling because of the potential for subject groupings. Ultimately, the QCF is a cohesive approach to the curriculum.'

Curriculum planning is almost completed for 2010/1, although funding and the size of particular qualifications are issues that Lynne is confident the LSC's successor organisations, sector skills councils and awarding bodies are working to resolve.

The college has put some young people who have been unemployed for six months through units already available through the QCF. This means they could build up credits that would count towards full qualifications if they progressed into work and/or did more training in the future. There are some customer care units we’re about to start delivering that will have the same effect. It’s like a taster but has the potential to lead on to a full qualification.

'Some young people have completed a taster that has helped them decide whether to progress down the construction or the engineering route. This could lead on to an apprenticeship or Train to Gain-funded programme, and that’s been beneficial for the learner.'

She says other colleges planning the transition to the QCF might consider having a CPD programme alongside a communications strategy.

'Initially we stepped back from curriculum planning and looked at where we were and what qualifications we were using, where they were in the transition from the NQF to the QCF, and what effect that would have on our overall provision and resources.'

North Hertfordshire College North Hertfordshire College doesn’t see the QCF as anything especially revolutionary, but rather as a case of the system catching up with the way it and other colleges had been thinking for years.

'The QCF was designed three or four years ago,' says Signe Sutherland, the college’s deputy principal, 'but over the past 10 to 15 years we have all been saying how fantastic it would be to have a unitised curriculum in a credit framework.'

That’s precisely what the QCF promises to deliver once the national issues of funding and qualifications accreditation have been resolved. Signe, who is responsible for curriculum and business development at North Hertfordshire College, welcomes the portability and uniformity that the QCF will bring to a range of qualifications.

'It has brought standardisation of qualifications,' she says. 'For some awarding bodies, a retail NVQ might require, say, six units while others would demand 10 units. Now the QCF says it must be a specific number of units everywhere. This is a real plus.

'I do think that employers having a major say in what they want young people to do is very important, and it will be a real advantage for young people to be given portable, bite-sized chunks of learning that motivates them. The QCF will be a driver for change that will be a benefit to all colleges. We will all go through the pain barrier, one way or another.'

The college’s preparations for the QCF are well underway, says Signe. It has changed the structure of how it plans the curriculum so that learning can be in the form of units or whole qualifications for some students.

'We’re training staff and QCF champions in the organisation who understand things so far, but we will need to get our heads around some very complex documents and new systems. We need to work out how we market this new structure and approach. It will change the whole way we publicise qualifications.

'There is a big job to be done to inform parents and employers. We need to tell people they don’t need to do the whole thing, but can do a unit at a time. We’re also working with curriculum leaders at the college so they can start to see what the implications are.'

Signe offers the following advice to other colleges about embracing the QCF.

'It’s worth rethinking the curriculum model even if you think that is too major a task,' she says. 'Go back to the drawing board and have another look at it. What they are saying is that in the longer term, students will be able to get qualified quicker.

'There might be some better flexibilities. It’s about trying to be innovative and finding online methods to support learning, so use it as your opportunity to drive change in your curriculum design.'

North Lindsey College North Lindsey College in Scunthorpe is full of enthusiasm for the QCF as an ideal – and hopes the reality will live up to it.

'The concept of the QCF is wonderful,' says Sue Martin, the college’s director of teaching and learning. 'It’s absolutely brilliant. We’re starting to question why we haven’t done it sooner. This is what we’ve been waiting for, but I’m not sure the funding for colleges will give further education the opportunity to provide such flexible programmes.

'I’m also slightly concerned about the complexities of it. I have teams busy planning next year’s programmes, but from a senior management point of view I don’t feel I can support them enough as there are so many unanswered questions at the moment.'

Sue says everybody at the college supports the QCF, but her colleagues would like a little more clarity and better communications.

'It’s very difficult for programme planning at this point in the academic year, as there are so many courses not on the QCF. How do we advise learners which route to study?'

Despite these concerns, some of which are shared by many other colleges, Sue remains undaunted.

'We will make it work,' she says. 'That’s what people in further education do. We’re good at problem-solving, and being innovative.

'We have a QCF champion who attends training and reports to the senior management team. Everyone from the principal all the way down is aware of it.

'We are running 'toolkits' – internal workshops – to ensure everyone knows about it. We are cascading the information up and down.

'But the QCF is in the early stages and I hope all that will come out in the wash. I’m hoping that it will encourage more people to come into learning, as it is intended to be more inclusive and responsive to employer requirements.'

Petroc Petroc in North Devon is looking forward to many of the benefits of the QCF but it shares the frustration of many other colleges in that the new system’s introduction isn’t happening fast enough.

Clive Rowe, one of the college's two QCF champions, echoes the views of many colleges when he says that uncertainty about funding and which qualifications will eventually be available through the QCF is making it hard to tell prospective students and employers what will be on offer in the next academic year.

'It has been difficult to find out what’s being funded and what’s not,' he says. 'The awarding bodies, to give them their due, have been good at communicating what qualifications have gone across to the QCF, what’s going to and what won’t. But when you’re putting together the college prospectus for the next year, it’s a struggle because not all the qualifications have gone across and we are still not entirely sure what the funding arrangements are going to be.

'Some qualifications have been on the QCF for over a year, but some of the others aren’t going across until after the start of the next academic year in September 2010. If we haven’t got all the information, we can’t put the courses together and this has understandably made it very difficult to put our prospectus together.'

Although the welcome Petroc is giving to the QCF is a cautious one, Clive says the college can appreciate some of the advantages of the QCF.

'The idea of the QCF is very good as it makes qualifications much more visible,' he says. 'However when you start to look at a candidate who wants to do a qualification and select a unit of this and a unit of that, there will be issues with delivery and time and viability unless you get the right number of others also selecting those same units.'

In its efforts to embrace the QCF, the college has set up a steering group headed by its director of learning and performance and made up of people who run its marketing, exams and student records operations.

'We’ve now completed the training which was extremely beneficial. Being able to work with like-minded people from other colleges and private training providers made us realise that we are all looking at the same issues,' says Clive.

'During the training we were given the opportunity to come back and work with groups within our college to look at the implications, not only for my section of business development, but also across other areas of the college such as exams and marketing.

'There is a significant change required in the way the QCF is going to be implemented across the college so we’ve been looking at not only the individual implications, but also for those across college as well.

'There’s a lot of work to do in terms of setting this up. Our steering group meets every two weeks to review any updates to the QCF and look at progress with our implementation plan.'

Walsall College

Walsall College is positively embracing the new QCF. Sue Reynolds, the college’s director of qualifications and its QCF champion, is full of enthusiasm about the QCF and the difference it’s making to the college. Like her counterparts at other colleges, she acknowledges there are still national funding and qualification accreditation issues to be resolved, but she isn’t letting those issues spoil her genuine excitement about the QCF.

'I believe it’s the best thing that’s happened in years,' she says. 'As a direct result of preparing for the QCF, we’ve realised the principal’s ambition for the college to become an awarding organisation in its own right.'

Sue is now managing director of Accredited Skills for Industry, an arms-length awarding organisation that shares premises with Walsall College.

'We’ve become an awarding organistion to ensure the employers we work with can get the accredited training they need' says Sue. 'That’s an enormous benefit of the QCF. The college now has another role and can offer a wider, broader curriculum offer for employers. The spin-off is we can accredit not only our own training but our college partners’ training. It’s expanded our offer. The QCF readiness money has been an absolutely invaluable resource, too,' she says.

To spread the message across the college, Sue organised a staff development day with guests including the director general of City & Guilds and other QCF champions. A second day gave people from other colleges and training providers a chance to meet representatives from the Skills Funding Agency and the Sector Skills Council, among others.

She says. 'This is about having the best influence we can have over curriculum planning. In the college we encourage middle managers to compare old qualifications with the new ones. Directors of curriculum at the college are working with heads of school to see where any gaps might be.'

So what advice can Sue offer to other colleges about the QCF?

'You need someone who really understands the QCF and its potential' she says. 'And if you don’t have such a person, link up with another college that does and give them a call.'