RoSPA Young Drivers at Work Report

Chapter 8
“If you said to me, I’ve now got an additional
expense that I have to train all my drivers up to a
new standard over and above the road test then
I’m going to squeal like every other company would.
Just another expense that I’ve got to go through...
Don’t make it something that’s free and not worth
the paper it’s written on because then the insurance
companies won’t back it anyway and it’ll be worth
nothing: it’ll just be a piece of paper. ”
(Facilities Manager, telephone interviewee)
Respondents suggested that one way of guaranteeing
quality would be for the training to be accredited to a
recognised and preferably national standard: the British
Technology and Education Council (BTEC), and National
Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) for example:
“I think it would have to be City and Guilds or BTEC
or something like that because I know they run
assessment schemes for compliance and I know
that if someone’s gone through that scheme in
any one of the assessment centres throughout the
whole of the UK, I know with some confidence
that they have been subject to audit and the
quality as uniform as you can possibly make it.
At least then you’ve got some commonality, some
standard throughout the whole of the UK. ”
(Training Officer, telephone interviewee)
“If they had a certificate at the end and they passed
it we would know they’re at a certain standard so
we could then present that to our insurers and
we would be confident that they were competent
as well. ”
(Health and Safety Officer, telephone interviewee)
For organisations who deliver their own training there
was a call for ‘train the trainer’ style courses whereby
independent assessors could verify the internal systems
already in place, and help develop, where needs be, to the
recognised national level:
“What it needs is the people delivering the training
need to be accredited, so people like me and my
team need to be accredited. At the moment we do
it based on our own staff standards, there needs to
be literally a step change here to a level which is
recognised as an accredited scheme. ”
(Local Authority Manager, telephone interviewee)
An advantage that respondents highlighted was that a
national qualification would allow access to a list of
suitably qualified assessors. This would help them to
reduce delays in providing assessment and training for
employees when the need is first identified.
A recognised quality standard would also offer employees
a transferable skill, and provide employers with a guide to
good practice. A transferable certificate would save
employees from having to repeat the same level of training
when starting a new job involving driving for work. In turn,
employers would have a reliable benchmark for assessing
new employees’ training needs. This might save them from
conducting their own in-house assessments for each new
recruit, thereby, freeing up resources for more specialised
individual training plans. A post-test certificate would also
fulfil the HSE’s (2000), a), b), and c) of competence as
described earlier in this section:
“What I would like to see is that if you’ve got young
people that are trying to join a company, surely on
their CV’s, if they had taken on board the fact that
they would be required to drive a commercial vehicle
of some kind, bearing in mind that they are licensed
to drive up to 7 tonnes and they’ve been tested on
something that probably weighs something
approaching 7kg’s, to me there is straight away
there is a glaring gap both of skill and of underpinning
knowledge and if a training scheme, if they could
show me some underpinning evidence that they
had done some of that training, got some
experience of driving larger vehicles then at least
I’ve got something to work with. ”
(Training Officer, telephone interviewee)
Accreditation was not the only concern of employers when
deciding whether or not to invest in external training.
Training must be relevant to their staff, and delivered at a
level they would respect and subsequently pay attention to:
“Credibility. It’s credibility to professional candidates,
they’re used to high quality education and if it
doesn’t meet that quality standard then it gets to
be a joke quite quickly. ”
(Consultant, telephone interviewee)
Respondents were, for instance, giving on-line training
tools, which are a relatively new phenomenon, negative
reviews. This led to some reluctance by employers to buy
such methods of training in the future as the perception of
their worth had been damaged. Such a situation is not
conducive to repeat assessment and continual learning:
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