Development Education - Occupational and Functional Map
A NIACE response to PAULO on the draft occupational standards for development education - 27 August 2004
Published: August 2004
NIACE welcomes the publication of the draft occupational and functional map for the development education sector, in line with its broad support for the development of occupational standards and skills foresight for those working in the Lifelong Learning sector across the UK. Furthermore we welcome the attention given to this important area of work.
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In attempting to model the occupational standards for the Development Education sector, a text-book approach has clearly been articulated against other developing NOS, strengthening the overall proposal. |
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The document put forward an interesting use of standards - geared more towards promoting a particular ethos to individuals, communities and organisations than defining the detailed content of the engagement, again dovetailing with similar approaches in the Youth Work, Fento and Learning and Development standards. The mapping approach is therefore relevant to the context in which development education operates. |
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NIACE is concerned that the development of standards in this area could be viewed by practitioners as simply more ‘red tape’ - when the core purpose of occupational standards is to act as a broad HRM/HRD tool to inform best practice. If this approach is followed, then practitioners are able to use the standards as benchmark indicators of standards to which they should be aspiring to or regularly exceeding, rather than as a clumsy attempt at assessing competence. NOS assessment should be a process intrinsic to the professional development, made rich by the total ownership and understanding of how the standards relate to professional practice by the practitioner. |
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NIACE questions the approach used to establish total numbers of DE practitioners in the UK. This suggests in our reading that there are many more practitioners engaged in development education than is the reality in our experience. |
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Within the key areas of ‘essential skills’, ‘networking/partnership working’ could be further developed to include ‘relationship building’, in an attempt to remain true to the ethos of development education and its values, whilst the separate areas of ‘identifying and obtaining funding’ and ‘promoting and marketing’ could be usefully grouped together as project management skills, with the addition of a final skill area, that of the ability to comprehend and usefully communicate across a range of media the integrative nature of development education work. |
