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REASONS FOR REVIEWING THE EDUCATION OF TECHNICIANS The word Technician has been used for very many years without being given a precise meaning, but the recognition that there are groups of people carrying out types of work that can be given a general connotation — Technician work — has evolved gradually. The earliest recognition came in the electrical engineering industry, but recognition has now spread to other branches of industry, and to other activities in the life of the nation. The White Paper issued by the Ministry of Education in 1961, Better Opportunities in Technical Education, gave a lead to the technical colleges in designing courses of technical education specially for technicians. During the years following the issue of this White Paper, a great deal of attention was paid by teachers, training officers, industrialists and ministry staff to ways of implementing the recommendations contained in the White Paper, and particularly to shaping national certificate, national diploma, and City and Guilds courses better to meet the requirements of technicians. Although most of this attention was given to science‐based occupations, appreciation gradually developed that in commerce, business and service industries there exist also types of work that have responsibilities and requirements, of a similar nature, though differing in kind, to technician work in science based industry.

In 1962 nine sandwich course students were awarded the Higher National Diploma in Business Studies. They were the first graduates to be awarded the diploma and had been trained at the Liverpool College of Commerce (now part of the Liverpool Polytechnic). In 1967, 768 students passed the final examinations for the diploma. In the same year there were 4 364 students reading for this diploma. These are spectacular developments by any standards. They prompt the question — why? The Haslegrave Committee (1969) suggest a partial answer in para. 116.

Library assistants were originally considered to be professional librarians in the making, and were trained accordingly. With the expansion of libraries and librarianship, Britain's “apprenticeship” system of qualification gave way to formal library school education, and a new category of “non‐professional staff” was created, of people who were unwilling or unable to proceed to graduate‐level qualification. The development of non‐professional certificates of competence in the UK is described against parallel developments in the US, Canada and Australia; the COMLA training modules are also examined. The theoretical and practical issues surrounding training are discussed, training schemes and qualifications in the four countries analysed, and the relative merits of in‐house training and external certificate programmes argued.

Instinctive pragmatism, or planning by conviction rather than by coherence, is the hallmark of the government of education. We regularly devise new policies in a highly specific context (usually in the wake of a national report), and then negotiate their application in later circumstances in which many of the original suppositions, criteria and corollaries have been shed — either for educational or financial reasons, sometimes beyond our control. The Diploma in Higher Education is, in my view, in danger of following earlier casualties in this process; as we gradually change the educational criteria, and succumb to the recurrent financial crises which appear to follow all of our developmental White Papers with an inexorability which the Eumenides might have envied.

This article has been prepared by the Petroleum Industry Training Board to provide an up‐to‐date picture of what is happening in the fields of both technician and business education.

Although BTEC has considerably refined its approach to the development and embedding of common skills (core skills) within its Higher National Programmes in recent years, argues that there are still a number of problems associated with the practical operation of this strategy and obstacles to a deeper acceptance of the common skills pedagogy within a higher education context remain. From a survey of students who completed a Higher National Diploma at Sheffield Business School in 1993 the crucial issues in this respect were seen to be the complexity of the common skills strategy, difficulties in the area of assessment, the value placed on subject knowledge by students, the lack of an acceptance of a common skills profile when applying for jobs, interviews, and further study, the fact that students thought some skills to be more important than others, and the fact that the development of skills was not undertaken with sufficient reference to probable future contexts where they could be utilized.

The purpose of this study is to determine the degree of attention to and the nature of sustainability issues in the curriculum of the Higher National Diploma (HND) Purchasing and Supply Management programme of Ghana.

Documentary research is the approach used to analyse the curriculum document for the programme of study.

Findings of this study reveal a low presence of sustainability in the curriculum, and most of the sustainability sub-topics address issues of social justice, while economic sustainability issues feature the least.

Deliberate and greater efforts should be made to integrate sustainability in the curriculum; all three dimensions of sustainability need to be well represented in the teaching and learning experiences; and there should be training and sensitisation of all relevant stakeholders in issues of sustainability.

This study provides an analysis of a higher education curriculum in terms of attention given to sustainability and the nature of sustainability issues addressed therein. It sets the research agenda for the study of curricula of other programmes for sustainability, as research literature on higher education curricula for sustainability in Africa, especially Ghana, is scarce (GUNi et al., 2011).

Significant shifts of emphasis in the provision of the national system of awards in business studies are forecast by recent decisions of the Business Education Council, resulting from extensive consultations with industry, training boards, professional bodies, colleges and others in the twenty‐two months since BEC, as the Council prefers to be known, was set up. This article attempts to highlight some of the decisions which have particular relevance to the topics looked at in this issue on Education and Training.

Where do I go from here? An ABE student writes: