GOVERNMENT IS forging ahead with its efforts to standardise academic qualifications across the board.
Various stakeholders met today for an inception workshop on the development of the Barbados National Qualifications Register (NQR) in the Christ Church conference room of the Baobab Towers, Warrens, St Michael.
Executive director of the Barbados Accreditation Council, Valda Alleyne said the register would be the reference point for registered and accredited educational providers which in turn had to conform to the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), which she said was one of the critical pillars of the Human Resource Development Strategy 2011- 2016.
Project co-ordinator for the strategy, Maureen Pollard said they were at the draft stage.
“What we have at the moment is a draft design and the intention is to pilot the NQF to map our various qualifications from the basic CXC right up to the doctoral level,” she said.
Pollard said they were still in discussions as to who would have the ultimate responsibility for enforcing the NQR and NQF.
“The idea is to have a Barbados Qualifications Authority but at the moment we are still evaluating where that would lie – whether it would be a part of the Barbados Accreditation Council or a new entity. There are proposals which spoke to the role of the authority but exactly where it will lie is a decision which has to be taken at a much higher level,” she said.
The workshop was conducted by NQR team leader Dr Fortunato DaCosta and NQR information technology expert Dr Peter Denny.
They said the information on recognised providers and qualifications in Barbados was fragmented and their objective was to design a centralised information system to bring them into line. (CA)
