BUSINESS Herald (‘Scottish firms facing population challenge’, June 22) leads on the need for work-based learning to ensure provision of skilled employees. I would suggest that we turn the clock back 40 years. At that time, school-leavers entered employment and their employer would send them one day a week to attend the local college. Those with appropriate O Grades or Highers could study for ONC, HNC and Supplementary Studies. These courses blended theory with the work-based practice.

Those who were less well-qualified could nevertheless study for London City and Guilds qualifications, which offered education for the traditional trade apprenticeships. They were internationally recognised and provided training for young people throughout the former empire. Despite their craft emphasis, they offered a ladder of progression to professional qualifications.

Today a criticism of these former college qualifications would be that assessment was heavily weighted towards exams. However, current assessment may be too heavily weighted towards coursework, which can be abused, by plagiarism or professional input.

Unfortunately, universities, unlike today, tended not to consider college qualifications eligible for advanced entry. Day-release students attended for between seven and eight hours of intensive teaching. The students gained maturity by instruction clearly related to their careers.

In the case of ONC and HNC engineering programmes, the examining body was SCOTEC. This was a charitable body administered by industry, the colleges, professional bodies and universities. They produced gold-standard awards.

Every course had a prescriptive syllabus. The examiner would write a paper with solutions and a marking schedule. This material was then scrutinised by an exam panel chaired by a university academic.

For the examiner, who was unpaid, this was often a painful experience as their peers questioned and quizzed them in order to validate their paper. The pass mark was set at 50%. The consequence of this was that a student with a day release HNC with Supplementary Studies was a skilled employee and in many cases more skilled than many graduates today. This system provided a standard for technical education and as the students were employees, attrition rates were minimal and students could relate exam progress with career progress. It provided stability and contributed to their confidence and transferable skills.

The establishment of Government-sponsored Industrial Training Boards provided the framework for this. That is something we miss today. Today, we have a large university sector competing for students, and though many courses are excellent, there are some courses that provide degrees unrelated to the needs of employment and with weak assessment methods. The college and universities assisted by government and industry could I think revisit this model to benefit the student and industry.

- Robert F Gibson, Blanefield

A poor show

IMAGINE a country where 35% of the working population has gone without food before payday at least once over the past year, and where up to 50,000 more children will fall into poverty in the next five years and you have just read the latest shocking figures produced by Citizens Advice Scotland on the true social dilemma facing Scotland.

The cruel reality of high employment in Scotland is that many of these jobs are zero-hour contracts and paying only minimum wages, leaving the poor to get poorer and child poverty to increase. After many promises and targets set by the SNP the sad reality is they have all failed to stem family and child poverty in Scotland, which is now fast becoming out of control. Scotland deserves better.

- Dennis Forbes Grattan, Aberdeen