Minister, Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce the new Standards to you today. I am extremely grateful to you, Minister, for your strong words of support for them. Our Chairman has rightly referred to your understanding of the importance of engineering and technology, and your tireless advocacy on their behalf. It is because we recognise that understanding that your presence and support here today are so welcome. I shall pick up some of your particular points about the new Standards later.

The Minister referred to his pleasure at the fact that the new Standards had emerged so quickly. I must confess to having wondered, when we set out on this exercise a little over twelve months ago, whether the timetable we had set ourselves was realistic. Many of you in the audience may have shared those doubts. After all, SARTOR 1997 had taken the best part of five years to come to fruition, and yet it could hardly be said to have generated universal acceptance or enthusiasm. Could a successor really be produced in a year?

Well, as you see today, the answer has turned out to be ‘yes’. For this, there are a great many people whom I have to thank. I must indeed begin by thanking my colleagues on the Review Steering Group, and all my colleagues on the ECUK Board, for the outstanding contribution which they have all made to the project. There has been no shortage of argument, of provocative suggestions, or of readiness to fight a particular corner. But all this has always been done in a constructive spirit, with a view to making the finished product one which could really command support. I am most grateful to our Chairman and to my colleagues for all this.

Thanks must go to a much larger body of people too. I think that the pleasingly large number of people whom we see here this morning is simply one indication of the way in which this project has engaged the engineering profession and those who are close to it. Right from the outset there has been very wide participation in the search for new standards. One of the first things we did was to invite comment via the ECUK website about the direction which the review should take. That engaged a lot of people. Last December we held an all day consultation event at the Institution of Civil Engineers, attended by almost as many people as are here today. From that event, we were able to distil a lot of key messages from our community about what was needed in formulating standards for professional engineers and technicians in the twenty-first century. This proved to be an invaluable foundation for us as we attempted to produce a specification for new standards. Our consultation on a draft specification, in the spring, again produced comments from a large number of organisations and individuals.

So thanks are due to the profession as a whole for the contribution which it has made to the generation of new standards. Beyond the individual contributions which I have spoken of, I must mention in this context the corporate effort which the professional engineering institutions have made. I know that professional institutions do not always get a good press, and that the engineering profession in particular has sometimes been seen as too prone to division and to stressing differences. But the plain fact is that we would not have got anywhere near completing this exercise in a year if it had not been for the readiness of the Institutions to engage with the project in a very big way. Leading members and senior staff from the Institutions have made a massive contribution to some of the detailed work that has gone on in a number of working groups, but equally significantly they have shown a constant readiness to conduct a constructive dialogue about the principles underpinning the new standard, and to seek agreement on those. I believe that this whole project has done the profession great credit.

Having mentioned the principles underpinning the new standard, it’s now appropriate to say something about them.

One aspect of SARTOR 1997 which did command widespread support, among those who knew about it, was that it established Competence and Commitment as the basis for registration as a professional engineer or technician. It established some clear descriptors for professional engineers and technicians, and a set of generic competence statements for each registration category. That approach, and those statements, were very much welcomed by those who were familiar with it, and among employers especially there was strong support for the competence-based approach. However, for a number of reasons, the fact that competence and commitment were the main basis for registration often went unremarked. There was a widely-held perception that SARTOR 1997 was all about educational inputs and achievements, and moreover that these educational inputs were in some ways narrowly or arbitrarily defined.

So what we have sought to do in developing the new UK-SPEC is to stress the centrality of competence and commitment. When you look at the booklets which you will take away from here today, you will see the competence and commitment statements for Chartered and Incorporated Engineers, and for Engineering Technicians, are the most prominent feature of them. These statements continue to stress that all professional engineers and technicians, whichever area of engineering they are working in, need a mixture of technical and non-technical competences, and professional commitment. They relate strongly to the various higher level occupational standards which have been developed in engineering, construction, management, and other areas, and to other competence frameworks which large employers have developed.

We believe that these statements articulate the vital role which Chartered Engineers, Incorporated Engineers play, not only in performing engineering functions, but in exercising technical leadership and management in a range of different business contexts. They also bring out, more clearly than before, the role of engineers in supporting sustainable development. In respect of Engineering Technicians, we believe that the new standards emphasise the crucial role which they play in ensuring engineering and technological success, and the very distinctive set of creative aptitudes and skills which they have to apply. As the Minister has said, the separate presentation of a standard for Engineering Technicians allows the very distinctive professionalism which they have to be identified. We hope that it will also allow the profession to communicate directly with engineering technicians and their employers, and those concerned with their education and development. In this way the importance of professional membership and registration in enhancing skills for this important group of professionals can become more widely recognised.

As far as Chartered and Incorporated Engineers are concerned, the new Standards stress the distinctive roles that they play, what they have in common, and how they differ. They build upon what was in SARTOR 1997, but they bring a bit more clarity to the particular contributions of the two types of professional engineer.

I referred earlier to the fact that previous standards were perceived as placing overdue emphasis on particular types of educational input, and that we had felt a need to redress this to some extent. Please do not think that this means we are downplaying the role of education. As a Vice-Chancellor, I am hardly likely to be associated with anything like that! What we are talking about here are higher level technical and other competences, and the appropriate underpinning knowledge and understanding is a vital part of them. One cannot be competent without it. And that knowledge and understanding is generally going to be delivered by appropriate and effective education.

SARTOR 1997 raised the level of educational achievement required for both Chartered and Incorporated Engineers. At no stage in the review did we have the slightest idea of going back upon that. We were quite clear that Chartered Engineers needed knowledge and understanding at Masters level if they were to be competent. The MEng programmes which a number of our universities have run have been highly successful in attracting high quality students and in delivering high quality graduates who have had no difficulty in securing posts with some of our leading employers of engineers, where they have quickly made an important contribution. The only drawback that might be perceived is that these graduates have proved very attractive to employers in other areas as well!

However, for those who wanted to take a three year Honours degree and ultimately become Chartered Engineers, SARTOR 1997 left things unclear. The concept of a Matching Section was difficult to grasp, and the very title was unhelpful. What was supposed to be matched with what, and for what purpose? Was it all supposed to add up to some Platonic ideal of the MEng degree? And where did one find these mythical beasts? There seemed to be a risk that too many young engineers with three year honours degrees – which, for a number of reasons, have continued to be very popular – would simply be alienated from the profession.

So in UK-SPEC we have taken a flexible approach. We have said quite simply that the necessary knowledge and understanding for Chartered Engineers can be gained through an accredited Honours degree plus further learning to Masters level. That further learning might be through an appropriate MSc or other Masters degree – it will be up to the professional Institutions to judge which of these are suitable for their purposes. Or it might be through an appropriate work-based learning programme. That would ensure that the work which has been done by a number of employers, universities and professional institutions to develop work-based Matching Sections – and I must salute their efforts, in the face of the difficulties I’ve referred to – is not wasted, and these programmes can continue. In fact, I anticipate that we shall see a growth of work-based Masters programmes in Engineering in the course of the next decade. That would be a welcome development and would continue the long tradition of engineering education in the UK being a partnership between education and employers.

This approach preserves the status of the MEng degree as a fast track route for very able candidates, but recognises that there are a range of avenues which holders of three year Honours degrees may wish to take. It ensures that none of these avenues is closed off from registration. This is as it should be, since registration is based upon competence.

For Incorporated Engineers and Engineering Technicians, there were not the same problems to deal with. UK-SPEC maintains the exemplifying qualification for Incorporated Engineers as an accredited Bachelors degree, with or without honours. However, it again recognises that programmes such as the HND and HNC remain very popular and are well regarded by employers. For holders of these qualifications, it allows for further work-based learning, as judged appropriate by the professional institutions, to give them the necessary knowledge and understanding. UK-SPEC also recognises the emergence in England of Foundation Degrees, and allows for holders of these to undertake further learning in just the same way as holders of Higher Nationals.

For Engineering Technicians, we have continued to recognise a range of qualifications, of which National Certificates and Diplomas are probably the most popular, as providing the necessary knowledge and understanding. Once again, for this important group, UK-SPEC acknowledges the significance of work-based learning. In particular, it allows professional institutions to recognise particular schemes or programmes as appropriate, and encourages them to build upon the very welcome example shown by the Institution of Incorporated Engineers and SEMTA, which has led to a number of the latter’s Advanced Modern Apprenticeship programmes being recognised as providing the required competence for registration as an Engineering Technician. The professional commitment to lifelong learning through CPD, which registration brings, provides a value-added element to the AMA scheme. I hope we can see this spread to other sectors.

So for all categories of registration, UK-SPEC recognises the contribution which work-based learning can play. I hope that all employers will appreciate this.

There are two other significant features of UK-SPEC which I want to highlight today. One concerns the accreditation of educational programmes. One of the controversial features of SARTOR 1997 was its introduction of entry standards as one of the criteria for accreditation, and a requirement that a specific proportion of an entry cohort should have a specific level of achievement in A levels or an equivalent. I am not today going to go into the arguments for and against this; they have been heard pretty clearly over the last few years. But, having looked at all the factors involved, we decided that it was not in 2003 appropriate to maintain the requirement. Accordingly, entry standards are no longer a metric in course accreditation. Of course professional institutions will continue to look at them. No-one wants to see the sorts of adverts which did appear in a newspaper a few years back, saying, “Done badly in A levels? Come and do an engineering degree.” Universities will have to show how they will support their students with lower entry qualifications to achieve the necessary outcomes. Any university engineering department worth its salt should of course be doing that any way.

Outcomes will in fact be the key word in course accreditation in future. To be accredited, programmes will have to ensure that their graduates do indeed achieve a range of specified learning outcomes. I will not go into the details now, but a working party from professional institutions, the Engineering Professors Council, and the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education has been working on the development of outcome statements which the profession and higher education could then use. Of course there will be a clear relationship between these and the competence statements which lie at the heart of UK-SPEC.

The other key innovation in UK-SPEC is the way in which candidates who don’t have the exemplifying academic qualifications, even under the new and more flexible rules, can still be registered. It has always been possible for such people to get registered, but sometimes the rules have seemed complex. UK-SPEC offers them a range of ways of demonstrating the necessary knowledge and understanding, most significantly through writing a technical report based upon their experience. Obviously to do this successfully they will have to have suitable experience to base it upon. The professional institutions will have to make sure that they have proper assessment procedures in place. No-one wants this to be a soft option, because that would jeopardise the whole of the standards, especially in terms of international acceptability. Nor should it be easier to come through this process than through more conventional routes. But, if registration is based upon competence and commitment, then it is surely necessary that all those who are truly competent have the chance to demonstrate that, and that the processes for doing so are accessible. If something is accessible, it does not automatically mean that it is easy.

So there are the principal features of UK-SPEC. It maintains the previous requirements for professional development, and especially the requirements for registrants to engage in continuing professional development – lifelong learning, we might now call it – throughout their careers. This is crucial, if competence is to be maintained and enhanced, and is in any case a necessary part of professional commitment.

There is of course still some more work to be done. With the professional Institutions, EC (UK) is still hammering out the precise details of the arrangements for implementing UK-SPEC. But these are matters of procedural detail. They will not delay the implementation of the new standards during the course of 2004. There is a lot of work for Institutions to do, but I know that they will continue to approach the task n the same enthusiastic and constructive spirit they have shown during the past twelve months.

Although dramatically different from its predecessor in style and content, UK-SPEC builds upon the experience accumulated by the engineering profession over many years. The standards represent evolution rather than revolution, and reflect thinking internationally as well as in the UK on the importance as a means to assess the contribution professional engineers and technicians can make to the economy. With renewed thanks to all who have helped their development, I commend them to you.