Country-specific reforms

Governments in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland are committed to achieving the aims of the UK VQRP. They will ensure that the reforms enable individuals' qualifications to be understood and accepted throughout the UK, and that employers, awarding organisations and Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) can operate smoothly across borders.

Within the UK VQ Reform Programme all four nations are involved in:

• Developing Sector Qualifications Strategies and cross-sector Qualifications Strategies, and action plans for the development of VQs
• Ensuring alignment and, where possible, articulation between the qualifications frameworks: the QCF, SCQF and CQFW
• Researching and evaluating the impact of the programme
• Ensuring consistent messages about the programme are communicated

In addition, England, Wales and Northern Ireland are:

• Developing a Qualifications & Credit Framework, which will form a pillar of the Credit & Qualifications Framework for Wales and have read-across to the Scottish Credit & Qualifications Framework and European and higher education frameworks.
• Taking work forward on ways by which employers and providers can have their bespoke training accredited within the national system. This work is primarily taking place in England with Wales considering whether and how to extend this to Wales and Northern Ireland monitoring progress
• Taking their own approaches to developing or reviewing funding and provider capacity to deliver the reformed VQs.
• Ensuring ongoing removal of duplicated and unnecessary VQs.
• Developing a process for SSC 'approval' of VQs

Other aspects of the reform are specific to only one nation, such as the programme of work to support and develop the capacity of providers to deliver the reforms (England only). Wales is also working with providers to build their capacity, as part of the overall CQFW development, as summarised on the Welsh government site.

In Northern Ireland the implementation of the Further Education Strategy Review, 'FE Means Business', 'The Review of the NI Skills Strategy' and 'Training for Success' all outline the strategies that are in place to address with the wider reform agenda and can be found on http://www.delni.gov.uk.