An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

128A CHRONICLE OF THE ENGINEERING COUNCILShortly after the publication of SARTOR-3, Professor Levy retired from the EngC for asecond time his task having been completed, although he remained as a consultant until theend of 1998. He was succeeded as Director of the BER by Andrew Ramsay, a CharteredSecretary and a Chartered Engineer, and the Secretary of CIBSE at the time. Immediatelyprior to the Fairclough reforms of 1996 Andrew Ramsay had chaired regular meetings of theSecretaries of the 12 largest Institutions. As these meetings had been concerned with advisingon the structure and Byelaws for the reformed EngC Andrew Ramsay was well versed on thelatest developments.A Registration Standards Committee (RSC), under the chairmanship of Geoff Fuller, wasestablished in 1997 to replace the moribund Registration Referral Committee and monitorSARTOR-3 and maintain Part 2 of this document, its members being nominated by the BERand the Institutions. The RSC held its first meeting in December and set up some task groups.This Committee also prepared several “second issue” documents, masterminded by PeterSwindlehurst, which were distributed in June 1998.A National Seminar on SARTOR-3 was held in 1998, widely attended by universities and theInstitutions but regrettably not a few found it disappointingly unhelpful. Nevertheless, theEngC created a comprehensive library of source materials in 1998 and funded research intothe early impact of SARTOR-3, incidentally discovering that a high proportion of RegisteredEngineers included directors or chief executives of the FTSE 100 companies.In 1998 then, the BER set the new standards and criteria for the registration of CEng, IEngand EngTech. Close links continued to be maintained, as in the previous two years, with theInstitutions, the NVQ Forum, the Occupational Standards Council for Engineering, JointAccreditation Boards and bodies representing engineering Higher Education and FurtherEducation. The EngC met with engineer Vice Chancellors to discuss degree output standards,a continuing concern on all sides for a variety of reasons. The Engineering Professors’Council, still not reconciled to the specification of entry standards, continued its researchstudy with the aim of defining and assessing output standards as an alternative method ofaccreditation.Opinions on SARTOR-3Mike Heath:“During 1996, there was some concern about the attitudes of our international colleaguesbecause of our perceived failure to match up to world standards. That these concerns havenow dissipated owes everything to what I regard as the single greatest achievement of myperiod in office. That was the revising of SARTOR to challenge the educational standardsand structures currently prevailing in Britain and fundamentally to raise the standard forregistration as an engineer in the UK.“The SARTOR revision had to be handled as a major campaign against determinedopposition from many in the Institutions and virulent opposition from many in the academiccommunity. The vested interest of the Institutions was that they might suffer reducednumbers of members and, therefore, income. To be fair, however, there were many who© Engineering Council UK 2004