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The award of Certificate in Professional Competence (CPC) is the "must have" qualification in the transport sector. A legal requirement for anyone nominated as the competent person responsible for managing operations under a standard or standard international licence. It's designed to create the vocational skills necessary to ensure transport compliance, covering a range of legislative and business topics. Each year in the region of 5,000 candidates will take the CPC for the first time and for  many their job is dependant on successfully achieving a pass mark. A significant proportion will have started their career as drivers, working their way up the organisation or possibly setting out on their own, and for many completing the CPC could be their first return to learning since school.

The qualification is designated at level 3 on the national qualifications framework, making it roughly equivalent to A-levels, and anyone that has completed it will tell you about the diversity and depth of knowledge required. It's a fact that exams can be stressful, and the added problem of work pressure and being an inexperienced learner make the CPC a difficult qualification to achieve. Oxford Cambridge and RSA Examinations (OCR), the awarding body for the qualification have recently introduced some changes to the syllabus and the first exams covering these were in March 2006. The changes were designed to upgrade the award, bringing it into alignment with other level 3 qualifications,  but also ensuring that key topics are always questioned.

The national results have just been published by OCR for this exam and the pass rates weren't good! The unit four paper (National Freight case study paper), viewed as the most difficult part, had a pass rate of only 41.5%, significantly lower than previous pass rates which have been consistently above 50%. This figure includes re-sit candidates, which masks the true first-time pass rate, which is likely to be closer to 30%. That's a 70% failure rate.  When we consider that around 5,000 candidates register for the exam every year, a 10% drop in the pass rate could equate to an additional 500 failures each year having to re-sit. The CPC has to be vocationally relevant and it has to meet the legislative requirements as laid down in Annex 1 of the EU Directive 98/76/EC. However, the danger is that we may start to experience a dramatic shortage in CPC holders if national pass rates are this low.

Of course this may just be a blip, occasionally seen in past papers, but it is pertinent that this is the first exam of the new syllabus. So what's the reason for this? Is the new syllabus more difficult? Have the questions become harder? Is it the standard of students coming through? Is it the quality of training provision? These are all difficult questions to answer as they are all factors impacting pass rates but if I was to hazard a guess I would recommend that OCR revisit the award and determine whether their exam is effectively 'delivering the goods'. At the FTA we deliver training to close on 1,000 CPC students a year and for us training and assessment run in parallel. We regularly achieve good pass rates but if we are delivering quality instruction to meet the requirements of the syllabus, but the assessment criteria becomes a moving target, then it becomes increasingly difficult to help our delegates succeed.  If this is purely about passing an exam then we have got it wrong. The CPC is about raising standards and developing competence, and that is what our industry needs.