7 Responses

1. See our accreditation advice guide
   Mary

   Have you seen our guide on ‘how to get your training accredited’? It’s listed in the frequently asked questions on the Any Answers home page – you can also get to it direct from https://www.trainingzone.co.uk/item/53856

   Hope this is of use.

   Regards

   Stephanie Phillips
   Editor, TrainingZONE

2. External Accreditation for Training Programmes
   We do a lot of work with the voluntary sector in terms of developing and delivering accredited training programmes. We also work with partner organisations to accredit their training. Please email me if you’d like to discuss further.
   Jayne McCarten, Business Development Manager, Lancaster University j.mccarten@lancaster.ac.uk

3. A guide to accreditation for voluntary organisations
   Project2001 (based at the RSA) and the Sharing Credit Project have recently published ‘Pathfinder – An Accreditation & Networking Guide’. The guide aims to help voluntary & community organisations interested in learning and training, and more specifically, accreditation. It offers information and guidance on a selection of accreditation routes and helps you decide which may be most suitable for your organisation. It provides helpful regional and national contacts.

   You can contact the Voluntary Sector NTO to get hold of a copy. (Email: eleanor.madley@ncvo-vol.org.uk, telephone: 020 7520 2497, website: http://www.vsnto.org.uk)

4. Accreditation
   You can put together a toolkit programme and link it to a NVQ and claim for single units. For this, you or the company you are working with will have to become a centre registered with City & Guilds, OCR to name a couple of awarding bodies.
   Theonly other way is to submit the course to QCA for accreditation but this takes an awful long time
   If you want advice on accreditation etc e-mail me to discuss it further

5. Voluntary Sector Accreditation
   Mary

   I worked as an accreditation adviser througout the lifetime of Project 2001 which operated in Yorkshire and London.

   A number of groups that I worked with investigated developing their own accredited programmes.

   The Open College Network allows groups to have their own programmes accredited and is cost effective(they also have a database of “units” that have already been written.

   Other awarding bodies, edecxel, city and guilds OCR (in addition to offering existing awards that may be suitable for the voluntary sector) allow the writing of customised awards.

   The NCFE awarding body is relatively cheap and flexible for customised awards.

   Also Voluntary sector activities do fit into the NVQ framework (Assesment centre for Voluntary Organisations – ACVO offer management, customer service, Training and development, care and accounting all assessed by volunary sector aware assessors)

   Within NVQ’s it is possible to get unit accreditation rather that the full award , which may be suitable for some VS groups.

   Gordon McGuire cityjag@yahoo.com

6. Accreditation
   The most flexible and cost effective organisation I have come across is OCNW. It is a national awarding body and has off the shelf and customised accreditation at all levels.
   For details contact Jakes makin OCNW Storey Institute Meeting House lane, Lancaster LA1 1TH 01524 845046 j.makin@lancaster.ac.uk

7. Inhouse accreditations
   Mary
   I have written an in-house first line management training programme that has been accreditted by the ISM Institue Of Supervisory management so I know they are happy to do this. There was a vast amount of criteria that I had to follow and a submission report needed to be compiled.