I'll post some of the private work in a different thread. For now, here's some of the projects that were completed working towards an NVQ3 in bench joinery.
I'm sure the system will be familiar to many of you and I'd be very interested to here from those who completed apprenticeships in any era as to what their experience was.
As a few starting points I'd suggest from my experience:
1) Day release (one day a week with college, the rest at work) is not an effective way to learn, particularly practical skills. A short college day takes a while to get going, the time for set up, discussion and packing away eats into the very limited time for practical work. Also Wednesday is an entirely impractical day to lose in the week for the employer.
2) There isn't enough practical teaching (for whatever reason: cost, time, weighting of assessment).
3) The NVQ system is plagued with jargon. It's been written to apply the same words to every job and ends up being much harder work than necessary.
4) The employer and specifically the tradespeople you're placed with matter a lot. I'm very grateful to the efforts of those at my old company and at college for their efforts within the system.
That's enough of that, here are some pictures [hopefully]...
I'm sure the system will be familiar to many of you and I'd be very interested to here from those who completed apprenticeships in any era as to what their experience was.
As a few starting points I'd suggest from my experience:
1) Day release (one day a week with college, the rest at work) is not an effective way to learn, particularly practical skills. A short college day takes a while to get going, the time for set up, discussion and packing away eats into the very limited time for practical work. Also Wednesday is an entirely impractical day to lose in the week for the employer.
2) There isn't enough practical teaching (for whatever reason: cost, time, weighting of assessment).
3) The NVQ system is plagued with jargon. It's been written to apply the same words to every job and ends up being much harder work than necessary.
4) The employer and specifically the tradespeople you're placed with matter a lot. I'm very grateful to the efforts of those at my old company and at college for their efforts within the system.
That's enough of that, here are some pictures [hopefully]...