Over the last few months I have been talking to a fair few people involved in fitness education with regard to the new Regulated Qualifications Framework (RQF). There has been much discussion of how this will effect those involved in fitness and health education.
The RQF will be introduced on 1 October 2015 and replaces the the outgoing Qualification, so is well in place by now. There however seems to be a great deal of confusion over what the new system will mean for training providers and ultimately learners.
The idea as expressed by Jeremy Benson, Executive Director of Vocational Qualifications, is that the RQF will provide a single, simple system for cataloguing all qualifications regulated by Ofqual. There are a number of key documents that have been made available by Ofqual to help those involved in education gain a greater insight into how the RQF will effect them!
I would start by looking at this video though where Ofqual explains the basics of how the RQF system will work.
There have also been some key documents that have been released over the last few months that give a little more detail about key aspects of the RQF. I have enclosed a short run down of each of these documents below:-
Qualifications and Components – this document outlines the requirements for different levels of qualification, including the level descriptors.
Total Qualification Time – This details the guidance around the assignment of total learning hours and guided learning hours. This may make some interesting reading for providers of distance learning and minimal contact courses.
After the QCF – a collection of documents that show the process of establishing and researching the RQF.
The general conditions of recognition and the supplement to that document are also available.
These documents in general are not light reading but they do help to explain the major differences when it come to the RQF and how it difference for the QCF.
