An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

72A CHRONICLE OF THE ENGINEERING COUNCILIn January 1990 a conference was organised jointly by the EngC, the Training Agency, theRoyal Society of Arts, and Industry Matters for educationalists, employers and professionalbodies to debate ‘Wider Access to Engineering Higher Education’. The conference waschaired by Sir Christopher Ball, the key-note speaker being Government Minister Tim Eggar.He stated that the “supply of engineers at all levels was vital to the future of the UKeconomy” and he urged employers and the Institutions to “make engineering moreaccessible”. As a result of this conference ‘Engineering Futures’, funded by the EmploymentDepartment, was published by the EngC in October 1990.Towards the end of this period a Joint Accreditation Panel (JAP), chaired by Mike SargentIEng, was established by nine of the engineering Institutions within the Executive Group 2Committee (EGC2) of the EngC. This joint venture brought together all the civil, water,highways, structural and building services Nominated Bodies that had members who wereIncorporated Engineers and Engineering Technicians. The intention was for the JAP to havedelegated powers from the Institutions to accredit IEng and EngTech courses on their behalf.The JAP drew up a memorandum of understanding with the BTEC laying down how the twobodies would work together; the concept was for BTEC resources to be utilized while JAP’sindependence was maintained in accrediting civil engineering courses. Within buildingservices CIBSE retained its own procedures but shared some of its policy decisions andworkload with the JAP. An accreditation agreement was approved in 1991 early during JohnFairclough’s Chairmanship of the EngC.It is worth noting that on the national scene at this time plans were afoot to allow thePolytechnics to use the “University” title. This soon led to the new universities being able toaward their own degrees. Also the separate funding councils, UFC and PCFC, came to besupplanted by the single Higher Education Funding Council (HEFC).Continuing Education and TrainingThe working party that had been established as a result of the June 1986 ‘A Call to Action’paper on Continuing Education and Training (CET) and to which we referred in Chapter 3,comprised employers, providers of CET, engineering Institutions, trades unions, ECROs andengineers and technicians. All had expressed interest in the proposals for individual engineersand technicians to maintain and detail their own personal career action plans using a speciallydesigned ‘Career Manager’ record book. The workshop held at the University of York,attended by industrialists and educationalists early in 1988 that we also mentioned in Chapter3, had debated possible pilot schemes to test the viability of these proposals. As a result ofthis workshop, a conference on ‘CET – An Investment for the Future’ was organised atCambridge in September 1988 jointly with the Careers’ Research and Advisory Centre(CRAC).The outcome, under the guidance of the EngC’s CET Executive, Chris Senior who had beenappointed in May 1988 in succession to Bernard Dawkins, was the introduction in thatNovember of a number of pilot schemes. Chris Senior, a Chemical Engineer by profession,had latterly been dealing with the recruitment, training and development of managers,engineers and other staff in a number of major engineering companies. Over the two-and-ahalfyears following his appointment to the EngC the pilot schemes involved over 540engineers and technicians in fifteen fairly large companies. Funding came from theDepartment of Education and Science (DES) through its Professional, Industrial andCommercial Updating (PICKUP) programme. To monitor and evaluate these pilot schemes a© Engineering Council UK 2004