Education and training the profession

Citation

Hoxley, M. (2007), "Education and training the profession", Structural Survey, Vol. 25 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ss.2007.11025baa.001

Education and training the profession

Regular readers of this column will know that the one subject that I am passionate about is the education and training of building surveyors. I was able to indulge this passion earlier this week when attending a meeting of building surveying academics at the RICS. There were delegates from nine of the twenty six HE institutions that have building surveying (BS) courses in attendance at the meeting, together with two influential employers from the Faculty Board and a couple of RICS Officers. It was a very interesting and thought provoking meeting.

We learnt that BS recruitment to courses is booming (at over a 1,000 in 2005) and that about a third of these new students are on post-graduate courses. Predictions made by several people (including myself) that recruitment would continue to decline following the imposition of minimum entry qualifications in 2001 have been proven incorrect. In fact recruitment has more than doubled since then. Academics at the meeting were bemoaning the loss of mature students to other courses and to other professions and it looks as if the RICS may well act to do something about this problem. Following the departure of the main architecture of education reform from the RICS recently, concerted efforts are being made by the Faculties to get the RICS to introduce more flexibility into the treatment of mature applicants’ entry qualifications.

The employers present at the meeting stressed that they believe that the quality of graduates from BS courses is not high. One example was given of a large national firm having to interview 60 graduates before finding the eight that they needed. Employers are also concerned about the quality of teaching of construction technology, dilapidations and contract administration on BS courses. The high referral rate of the BS Assessment of Professional Competence (APC) was discussed – currently only about 40 per cent pass the APC at the first attempt. Delegates at the meeting thought that this had more to do with the training candidates receive from employers than with the education they receive at university. There is no doubt that the diverse nature of the BS profession means that it is more difficult to pass the BS APC than it is for some other APC routes.

I have observed at fairly close quarters the education and training provided by two competing professions recently. My son has been admitted as a Solicitor in the last few months and my elder daughter has recently heard that she is exam qualified as a Chartered Accountant. Of course neither of these professions has anything approaching the APC. They are required to undertake structured training but it is up to their employer to say whether or not they have reached a level of competence to practise their profession. The big difference of course is that the Law Society and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales have a post-graduate qualification (the legal practice course which the Law Society police fairly rigorously and the ICAEW’s own exams). I think that the time is ripe for a move to introduce such a post-graduate (PG) qualification for surveyors. The RICS could then step back from accrediting under-graduate courses and concentrate their efforts on looking more closely at the PG courses. My perception (based at working at four universities over the last 12 years) is that the move from accreditation to partnership has led to a decline in the quality of some courses. Universities have taken the opportunity of a lighter touch approach by the RICS to drop some unpopular (and of course difficult) material from courses. A move to a more prescriptive PG qualification would enable the RICS to concentrate its efforts on ensuring that the core material required by surveyors was delivered and understood by the future members of the profession. I also think that the APC should be abolished.

Papers in this issue

There is a Scottish flavour to two of the papers in this issue. Alan Scott from just south of the border (University of Northumbria) presents another of his popular studies on the roofing of vernacular buildings – this time thatching in the Outer Hebrides. Alan Forster from Heriot-Watt considers the loss of binders in lime mortars in mass masonry structures – mainly ruins. Defoe and Frame add to the continuing debate about the seemingly out-dated methods used by rights-to-light surveyors. Finally Mansfield and Robinson consider the implications of recent case law on conditional break clauses in business leases – a subject that will be of great interest to those involved with dilapidations.

Mike Hoxley