Summary of Conference papers read by:

Summary of Paul McMahon's conference paper

As COTAC is about training, Paul McMahon, from Duchas, the Irish equivalent of English Heritage, had been invited along to give the conference an up-date on the European initiatives on training in conservation including a number of Leonardo da Vinci projects. They started five years ago and have now developed training material, some of which will be available free on the Internet shortly and some of which will have to be paid for. He said that when the programme started the construction industry had tended to think of conservation as “hanging on another tree, not the one they hung out of”. That had changed to some extent over the years.

COTAC themselves have developed NVQs at levels four and five (graduate and postgraduate levels) in conservation and which they hope will be adopted by universities in the UK before too long. COTAC also produced craft NVQs at level 3 for the Construction Industry Training Board, which had been used as a basis for standards setting for the European project.