Operational Licence

[Carl]

From the 1st April 2017, Greater Manchester are putting all operational crews through what is called the "Operational Licence" programme. It basically consists of various elements of the job which are all assessable over a 2 year period. More information can be found here. 

Rumour is, that if everyone carries out this, the transfer between FRS's will be much easier, providing you have an in date licence.

If your FRS operates anything similar, please feel free to discuss.

[Keith]

Interesting development, which would appear to be a move towards national standards. Only problem is will all Brigades / Services sign up to it and apply all aspects of it.?

[Carl]

Probably not Keith and like everything else, many FRS's will no doubt see it as good practice and begin to follow suit, however, many will then keep their distance to see ho it develops and of course this will be over a number of years, by which time it will have gone its full circle and something else will have reared its head. 

[TandA]

We have just had an operational licence section added to our ipds / training recording but at the moment it seems to be simply a tick box exercise.

[Joker]

DSFRS started down this road a few years back and it's still kind of on track. Based on the guidance provided by the Fire Professional Framework and the Fire appliance model, I.e. Competencies to be maintained are BA, Driving, ICS, Extrication, Working at Height, HazMat, Working near water, Pump operation. BA & ICS have always been trained and assessed well and a move began to develop the other areas to match. However practical course training on RTC has since reverted to an e learning element. And recently in view of funding challenges and service self reflection a review of all things training had been launched to ask ourselves the questions what & why? What do we need to do really! & why. So the original intention of the Ops Licence in my opinion seems to be in question as the service asks itself some reflective questions about what really matters. In my opinion, if you ask me, as a general trainer, for crews it's very good BA skills and fire development training coupled with Situational Awareness training that is most important as that is where we are most affected through Firefighter deaths.  If you ask anyone else it is probably RTC training or First Aid/FPOS as that is where we can/do mostly save lives.