How the Heating Industry Scaled Incompetence

In this episode I give a brief run down of what is currently happening in the sector. I discuss the recent Installer Show and how the Guild of Master Heat Engineers is attracting lots of attention and how many of the engineers are now offering Air to Air systems to their customers.  

I also take a look at the competence person schemes (CPS) and the online boiler ordering business models. 

I then take a bit of a deep dive into the research around online assessment. Could we be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire?   

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

So, welcome to another episode of Beta Talk. I'd like to thank my uh sponsors, my guild patrons, who are UK Radiators, Cast Rads, Primary Pro, Esby, Payaka, and Wolsey's Renewables Centre. So, firstly, sorry I haven't put out a podcast for quite a while actually now. Been busy since I got back from the installer show. So some of you would have gone to that, and I hope you had a good time. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Obviously, I know the people that put that on, put that show on quite well. I'm always very lucky. I always get a hotel provided for me. And this year they provided uh hotel rooms for some of my guild engineers. So the guild of master heat engineers has sort of really started to take off. You know, I wanted to do it slowly, start it slowly. I still want to sort of build it slowly. Um, I'm going to talk about scale in a bit actually, um, and how scale, when you scale things up in this industry, it sometimes does cause problems. Um, so there's a lot of interest in the guild, been having lots of meetings about it. Um, it's very simple, the guild, which I think sometimes confuses people. You know, a great engineering principal I learned years and years ago to try and keep things as simple as possible. Uh they tend to work better and last longer. So the show was good, it was very good for the guild. Like I say, a lot of the engineers um came and they had their hotels, so they really thoroughly enjoyed it. A lot of peer-to-peer learning went on uh among the beer. So today I want to sort of talk about some of the things that are going on, some of the things we're all seeing that's happening in the industry. Obviously, the big one is this heat wave has engendered a lot of interest, a lot of interest around air-to-air heat pump systems. So all the guild engineers that are in my WhatsApp group have all been talking about air-to-air. Most of them now are they've they've either already got F-Gas. I mean, a couple of them have been doing air-to-air systems for quite a long time. They sort of worked in the uh commercial sector. Um, but yeah, the inquiries they're getting about air-to-air systems have gone through the roof. I had a chat with my cousin the other day. He said that basically he couldn't get hold of any two kilowatt mini-split systems. I have heard Hayer. So Haya is one of the uh manufacturers that are very interested at the moment, they're one of the Chinese manufacturers, they've got some very, very good people now working for them. So uh Graham Hendra is now working for them, and Rihannan is now working for them, and uh it looks like they're gonna be doing good things, and they're one of the manufacturers that are very interested in working with the guild. So at the show, I think I think five manufacturers have expressed an interest in working with the guild. They want to take us out to their factories and have a bit of a training day, and like I pointed out on a LinkedIn post, when um when these engineers will go on their training, they're gonna learn obviously from the manufacturer, but the manufacturer is also gonna learn from the engineers because these are very, very good on-the-ground engineers. So they're gonna the manufacturers are actually gonna learn what current best practices are, so it's bi-directional what we call bi-directional learning, uh, horizontal learning is a is another is another name for it. I suppose one of the questions I do get asked is when it's when people are are realizing that the some of the guild engineers are are uh are installing air-to-air systems, so some of them are gonna be installing them this week, not under the bus. So the bus the bus grant for air to air, I think, is gonna encounter issues. And I think what's gonna happen is, and we are seeing it happen across the country, lots of people are getting interested in these what they're calling air conditioners. I I call it comfort cooling. I'll probably talk about that a bit later about the terminology. And obviously, it's very hard to keep cool by the way, so it's easier to the human bodies, it's easier to keep the human body warm than it is to keep it cool, especially when we get these wet, dangerous wet bulb temperatures, because then our sweat can't evaporate and get the heat away from our bodies and become very, very dangerous. So, lots of lots of interest in air to where I there's obviously a concern uh uh people are gonna have these things installed and probably only realise they do cooling and not realize they do heating as well. Obviously, that's not happening with the guild engineers, the guild engineers put these systems in uh properly explaining to the customer that can do do both things. So I think what we're gonna see over the next few years, and if we go to sort of uh the area I know most, so I grew up in a rural rural area. Dad and I were involved in oil boiler stuff, and you know, the the homes I've been in, you know, uh let's say the elderly people that's sitting in their front room watching Coronation Street or whatever they want to watch, um, you know, they can have a little mini-split system that's keeping that living space heated in the winter. They've still got their oil boiler for hot water, and maybe on the very, very coldest nights. And obviously, in the summer, they've got a nice cool space. So I think, and these systems are cheap as well. So I think we're gonna see this transition to heat pump technology not be like we all thought it was gonna be, where you you completely take out a system and put another system in. I think it's gonna be gradual, and and if you look at the heating sector, that's kind of always been the case. So there's plenty of people out there who've got their super duper efficient heat pump systems that still got log burners and stuff like that, maybe still coal fires. Well, I know they have because I've been around their homes. Um, yeah, we tend to sometimes we do tend to have different technologies within a home. So I think we're going to start to see people maybe get these things to keep them cool, keep themselves cool, but then understand, well, hang on a minute, this actually can heat us uh on a winter's night while we're in our living space. Perhaps don't even have to worry so much about the bedrooms when you go to bed. People most people like the bedrooms to be a bit cooler. Obviously, on the coldest of days, your oar boiler can come on now. Obviously, this goes completely against the fact we're trying to get off fossil fuels and take the whole fossil fuel system out, but that's not going to be appropriate for everyone. As we know, there's a big, big cost involved in getting this stuff. Whereas, you know, someone, you know, if I was back on the tools now, I would probably set up a company that specifically just put these little mini-split systems into these properties and very much explain to people that they're going to heat them as well. And I think over time, people are going to start to get used to the fact that air-to-air is for heating as well as cooling. Um, and I think I think the AC manufacturers are clicking onto this as well. Like I say, stocks are running, running low all around the country for the small mini-split units, and they are cheap. I rang up a cousin the other day. I said, What can you get? A two-kilowatt, uh a good quality one. I mean, so it says a Dakin one, and £275 for the outdoor unit, £93 for the associated indoor unit, and then obviously you've got to buy some stuff on top of that. You've got to buy your your two sizes of copper pipe and your lag in, and etc. etc. But yeah, it's going to be a bit of a cheap alternative for people. I think this whole thing of keeping cool is going to probably drive the heat pump revolution, who knows? Um, there is going to be problems, you know. I'm seeing it now. Lots of people rushing out getting their F-gas, and it's going to sort of be a bit like it was when the combi boiler was invented. You know, we are just sort of, or we have been just chucking them on the wall. And I'm going to speak about that actually in a minute because we do have a problem in this sector. Whenever we've seen whenever we've tended to scale things up, quality always drops. Um, so I had a that there was a big conference going on, was it last week or the week before, with one of the companies, um, Heatable. So heatable, a bit like Boxed, and I'll apologize now because as you know, I tend to say things that are provocative and upset people, but you know, I'm only trying to help people understand what's going on so we can make things better. So there's a big conference going on, I think over 300 people. So the boxed model was interesting when that came out. So obviously, the combi boiler came around, yeah, sort of roughly when the internet is sort of starting to become popular. So the people that set up Boxed obviously thought, well, let's make it easier for people to buy boilers. So a customer could go online, buy their boiler, gets delivered to them, and then the subby comes around and installs it. And that was all about scale, scaling up volume. Now, the trouble with that is the engineers doing the installation, bless them. They know how to, well, hopefully, know how to safely install your gas boiler. But apart from that, they don't know anything about the sort of the science of heat or the design or what's going to be good, they definitely aren't controlling these boilers properly. And that question was brought up at this conference with heatable. So heatables sort of do exactly the same sort of thing as boxed. And the question was asked, you know, how are you installing these boilers? You know, I think the sub is get paid around about £450 for an install, but the Subby has to supply all their copper pipe and fittings and all this sort of stuff. And I think they're quite happy. I think they're quite happy with that money. Obviously, it kind of incentivised incentivizes speed. I think some are probably prepared to just do one a day, but others will want to try and do two a day. And no flushing is really going on, so the systems' heating systems aren't being cleaned, so that's going to have a problem on the boiler down the road. Uh, the question was asked, how are you controlling them? Hive is a popular controller, but it's the on-off hive. And the question was also asked, well, how do you get these condensing boilers to condense? And unfortunately, heatables team, and I'm not blaming them, but there is a lack of knowledge. They said, Well, of course it's going to condense, it's called a condensing boiler. They had no awareness of uh temperature, you know, what your water temperature needs to be at before that boiler starts to condense. And obviously, the lower the water you the lower you drop that water temperature, your flow uh return temperatures and flow temperatures, the more condensing happens. And they were completely unaware of this. So we've got all these boilers going in at scale under these models, they're all being controlled on off, and that is going to reduce their longevity and not really a sustainable practice. So hopefully, those business models that exist are going to sort of try and we'll try and learn as much as possible and uh rectify that. So scale is very interesting in this sector. Obviously, we've got lots of entities now entering the heating sector, they've got investors who like to see, you know, they want to see predictable scale. Um I mean if you look at our our sector sort of over the last 30 30 years, you know, I definitely think we've scaled up incompetence. Um we've scaled bad practice um for various reasons, all sorts of sort of reasons. I mean, and and one of the things I want to talk about is is training. So the competi person scheme, I think, started, and if you don't know what that is, it's uh it's where engineers, installation engineers can can self-certify their work. So a lot of work in plumbing and heating is what we call notifiable. Building control is supposed to know about it. And back in the day, uh local authorities and uh and building control realized it's quite it's quite problematic to get around and inspect all this notifiable work. I mean, if you go back to the sort of 50s, 60s, 70s, plumbing in general and heated was quite simple. You didn't have that many people moving into a home and instantly thinking, right, I'm gonna revamp my kitchen, I'm gonna revamp my bathroom. Um, you tended only to sort of work on bathrooms and toilets as a plumber if they if they broke down or got blocked. But uh, as you know, that whole bathroom and kitchen sector is a massive, massive multi-billion pound industry. Lots of people, most of you listening, uh at some stage in your lives, have uh done a renovation on your bathroom or kitchen. So as we got into the 80s, we started to see that growth, and a lot of this work is notifiable. Now, building control had a problem of inspecting all this work. So I think it was 2002, and who what was the I think it was the government uh department for transport, um which obviously has had loads of names changes, so it's uh it's what is it now, the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government, I think now, but it was it was the office office of Deputy Prime Minister, I think, at one time. So that that's what set the CPC CPS system up. So the Commodity Person scheme is very interesting, it's where you're supposedly getting trained, you're then given a certificate, and then you you then register yourself with a company person scheme holder, and you're deemed competent to undertake different works. So you might go to do so. The the CPS stuff that I used to teach was G3 and Water Eggs. So lots of people are going on these water egg courses every five years, they're G3, which is all to do with sort of domestic hot water. They're going on these courses every five years. You need these courses to go on the heat training, heat pump training stuff, and to become MCS. And there's some winners in this because you know, and I want to because I I do say this on LinkedIn sometimes, and there's some really nice people I know that run training centres who are doing an excellent job. So there are training centres out there who are very conscientious, they want to do a good job, but there's a lot of training centres out there that just want to get people passed because that's how they get paid. So, ACS, your your average gas engineer is going to do their ACS every five years, and that's kind of a competent person scheme in its own right. So that they can install you, install your border, service your border. Now, within that community, we all know, we've all known for years and years and years, there will be certain training centres that will just get you through that. Um, my local one was called cheating heating. So there's a lot, there's a lot of engineers out there who, you know, when that five years comes up, they don't want to be you know, they're quite fearful that they might not pass, and so they go to the ones that they know, they go to these training centres that they know where they're going to get the passes. And I said to actually, I think it was Carbon Trust, it might be Nestor at the installer show, you know, some someone really needs to start doing some studies on the pass rates at these centres. There's there's hundreds of these centres around the around the country. The failure rate is basically non-existent. You know, everyone is passing. So I was chatting to an engineer the other day, you know, he'd just done his. He said, Yeah, same old thing happened, Nathan. You've got all of us who've been doing it for years. We go in, spend them days, we get passed. He said, You've then got the training centre, is then working with some of these engineers that uh have never done it before, they're struggling, but they're going to get passed. And then, as we all know, there's some people, bless them, that are uh quite challenged when it comes to IQ. They are still passing. So I've known centers to bring people in on a Saturday morning on their own and they get passed. Basically, lots and lots of people are passing, and what have they learned? They don't learn anything about the science of heat or really anything that we need to be learning, they're just learning how to safely connect a copper pipe from a gas border to the meter. That's about it, and they inspect the flu. Um, yeah, they don't know anything about the science of heat. Uh so we've got a problem, we've kind of scaled up in competence. And so the CPS schemes, interesting. So you've got some real winners. So the training centre makes money, you're paying the training centre to go there. Like I said, there is some good ones out there. The awarding organization that issues you your five-yearly certificate, they're making some money. You've then got a certification body, and that's obviously quite confusing because they don't issue a certificate, even though they're called the certification body. That's who you sign up with. Uh, you're now accredited to self-certify your work, so they make some money. We've obviously seen entities like Trustmark come on the scene who get involved with certain grant schemes, they're making some money. So all these people tend to be making some money, and but we've got no competence. So we've got some real big issues around the training sector at the moment, and training has become quite an exciting thing for I think a lot of entities. If you've noticed, there's lots of people now getting involved in training, and it's very interesting for me who's sort of researched this for a lot of years, uh, how we're now shifting to online assessment. It seems like there's going to be shifting to online assessment, and you know, that's going to have some positives, but it's also going to have some negatives. So I want to talk a little bit about that so anyone that's involved in that can sort of understand what the research is currently saying around these uh systems of online assessment. Actually, before I talk about um online assessment, let's just go back to that um I mentioned about the heat pump training. So the heat pump qualification, so all these people out there that are installing uh they've got their own MCS. So to get your own MCS, you have to have that heat pump qualification. And lots of centres around the country are doing that now. And the award and organizations that are issuing the certificates will be BPEC and LCL Awards. Um, you've got a new sort of kid on the block, they've been around a while actually, NOCN. They're getting involved with some of the training entities uh at the moment, and that's where I'll sort of shift in a minute to talk about online assessment and the challenges around that. But we have uh what's called the heat training grant. So that is excuse me, that's funding a lot of this heat pump qualification. So if you're new to heat pumps, you want to get into heat pumps and you want to get MCS, one of the first things you're gonna do is get on this course. To get on this course or to get MCS, you've got to have your water regulations, you've got to have your G3. So that's a competent person scheme, and as I've just pointed out, very easy to get. Everyone's sort of passing. Doesn't mean you're competent. And the heat training grant, I think, was originally 9 million, but it's been it's been raised to 21 million. So there's a 21 million pound pot. So anyone that wants to go on that course, uh that's getting funded, and the training centre gets that. That's 500 pounds per person. Now, some training centres will add on a little bit extra, so the person going on that training might have to pay another hundred quid. Other um training centres are only charging that 500. So that's taxpayers' money going directly to the training centre. And a few years back some of these training centres realized. They realized that they uh they could make some money. So they uh currently sort of training a lot of training centers that do the gas will also do the G3 uh course and the water eggs course. But they realize they could make a lot of money with this, so they send their gas assessors out to do the heat pump course, three-day course. Gas assessor now comes back. They've done the heat pump training themselves because they've got their assessors of all, you know, they're allowed to deliver training and assess it. They're now the ones teaching all these thousands of people about heat pumps and giving them the qualification. And the training centre's getting £500 per person that's doing that. So all the training centre had to do, you know, all they've got to do really is essentially. Market themselves and say, look, we now deliver that we now deliver the heat pump course. Come along and attack base funding, all that. And they are making some good money out of that. And of course, we've got we're churning out thousands of people that have been taught by people that have never ever been near a heat pump. You know, they were gas assessors one minute, then three days later, they're now qualified in heat pumps. And I've sort of challenged this heat training grant for quite a while. As you know, I'm a very, very big fan of the civil servants that are working in uh Desnes. Very big fan, but I think when it comes to this heat training grant, there's problems, and I've been quite vocal about this because they're trying to tell us all it's successful, and luckily, or um thankfully, one of my leading guild heat engineers had the opportunity to sit down with the minister the other day and basically say the heat training grant is not working, and that numbers are being fudged. And he actually said that to the minister, the numbers have been fudged. So I think there was a survey, I think a thousand people were surveyed who who've been on this heat pump course, and the survey is all about basically proving that it's a good course. In my mind, a rubbish survey, because there's a lot of research. If you go and ask someone who's just been on a course where they've learnt some new knowledge, they might have had a really sort of a nice sort of instructor in front of them, they will generally say, Yeah, yeah, it was great, it was great. That's not how you research whether something had a high impact on learning. So any of the civil servants involved in that training sort of look should really look at the research about you know what does signify that something's had a high impact on learning. Just asking someone that's been on the course, yeah, did you think it was good? And they go, Oh, yeah, yeah, it was good. That ain't good research. Not by any stretch of the imagination. The other issue is, which is why one of the guild engineers said to the minister it's being fudged, is because a lot of the um comms communications coming out around the HIT training grant is that 94% of people have been on it say it's a great course. What they haven't told you was that only around 3% of people out of the thousand survey, thousand people surveyed actually answered that survey. So A, the research is rubbish, it's not studying the impact of learning at all. Um and there's lots of research around that, you know, lots of research around how do you evaluate whether a course is good. There's something called the awestruck effect. I can't remember who who discussed that, but there's there's some research around what's called the awestruck effect, which basically means if if you're a learner and you've gone on a course, and for some reason that the person delivering the lecture, you know, you've really warmed to them, they're quite gregarious, maybe. You know, they've said something you never knew before. You tend to come away and think, oh wow, that was brilliant. I never knew that. They were great, they were a great teacher, and then you'll forget it in the in the next couple of days because unless you're using and applying that knowledge, you will forget it. And there's over 200 years of research on that. Ebbing House is um forgetting curve, and then Bartlett, loads of psychologists that have discovered have researched how our brain actually is very good at forgetting information, doesn't want to store loads of stuff, it doesn't think it needs storing. So the research going on around the heat training grant currently is dire, and that's taxpayers' money. So it's quite interesting to me why that's not being researched properly because this is taxpayers' money funded it, and of course, it's been deemed as successful because it will say, you know, 9,000, 10,000 people have done the heat pump training course. What it doesn't tell you is that the person they did the course with has never even seen a heat pump, uh, they just did the course themselves, and because they've got assessors' qualifications, they can now deliver the training. So you've got this wave and wave and wave of people, and again, it's a company person scheme, so every five years people have to go back and do that. So the training centre again is making money, your certification body that you have to sign up to is making money. We've got some bit of confusion around some of the certification bodies at the moment. So the APHC, the Association of Plumbing and Heating Contractors, has been denied uh their status at the moment by UCAS. So a lot of the engineers I know that are with the APHC are struggling to know what they've got to do now. In fact, actually, there is something uh they've been uh given to do. I can't remember what it is, but I think they've been switched over temporarily to another C B. But yeah, the C B companies is a bit bit up in the air at the moment. Big problem with the C B companies is they are the ones that go out and assess and audit your work, and those assessors bless them, you know, I'm not being personal, but a lot of them have not got any idea what they're looking at. So they will just assess your sort of paperwork processes and business processes, they they don't know what they're looking at when they actually look at the installation. Another another huge problem. So let's come back to this uh proctoring system I was talking about, you know, and how people are going to start to be be assessed. So currently, whether it's the the the heat pump, the heat pump course, or any of these other company person skiing courses, you go to a centre, you sit there, and listen to someone ramble on with a load of powerpoints. It might be a half-day course. Sometimes the water eggs are like a half-day course, sometimes it's a day's course, but a lot of training centres realise they could charge people double by doing the water eggs course at the same time as the G3 course and double bubble. So you sit through the uh through a load of PowerPoints, and then you're gonna do a multiple choice. So it's a paper-based exam. Uh, everyone basically passes if you get the wrong answers. Um, the way your assessor is allowed to assess, the assessor is allowed to sort of gently nudge you towards the right answer. That is the assessment process. So everyone that's done their assessor qualifications gets to learn that. You you gently got because obviously we all learn at different speeds and we'll have different abilities, so it's not about failing people, but but we've swung that pendulum too far because everyone is passing, and so that's always been paper-based, but it now looks like uh I know NOCN, who I think a lot of people are now going to be using as their uh awarding organisation, and and other awarding organisations like BPEC and LCL Awards. I think we're gonna start to see a shift to online assessment. So when I help people understand about online learning, some there's all sorts of names for it, distance learning, etc. etc. There's kind of two things you need to think of. You've got the online system that's giving people the information that's trying to inspire them to learn. And but then you've got this totally separate thing of assessment. Online assessment is different to online learning. Now, back when I was teaching when I first started teaching, if you've listened to podcasts regularly, you'll know that I started teaching in a prison. Um, so I had quite an unusual sort of introduction into the sort of the whole teaching space. Most people, when they go into teaching from my sector, are going to start teaching in a training centre or a college, and I started teaching a prison. It was the first prison in the United Kingdom to be teaching the level two and three City and Guilds plumbing and heating qualification. I never set the course up, so there was another lecturer who set the course up, set the workshop up. They did a brilliant job. That workshop was brilliant, and uh I think they got headhunted within a year and off they went. I never got to meet them, unfortunately. But then I was in, you know, I've got a degree in behavioural psychology as well, so or behavioural studies, so I think that's one of the reasons why I got the job. And the first students, the first students I taught, eight out of the twelve, were murderers. Still to this day, I'd still say they're the best cohort of students I taught. They were so enthusiastic about learning. But during that period is when City and Guilds gave all training centres and colleges around the country a three-year, a three-year period to change over from paper-based assessments. So they were doing exactly the same as these CPS courses. You know, in a college, a student would have to, you know, they'd get their sheet, they'd write down A, B, C, or D on it. It was all paper-based. But back when I started, I started in 2006, so City and Gills um rolled out this thing called Gola, Global, Global Online Learning Assessment. So they wanted all their assessments now to be done online and get away from paper-based. So they gave every training centre in college a sort of a three-year period to sort of transition. And because, you know, I'm training in a prison in a prison, but it still had a training centre number, it still had a City and Guild's uh training centre number. So I spent at least 18 months trying to convince. I mean, you imagine I've gone to the prison security, and the governors have said, right, I need we need to set up some uh a room where we've got computers where my students can go and do their exams, and they're like, Sod off, Nathan, we're not having computers in a prison that are connected to the internet where prisoners can go and get on the internet. Um, but eventually I managed to sort of get that that um that introduced, so I was the first person in the country to get computers into a prison for online assessment. So I know a little bit about it, and it's got problems. Online assessment has problems, and I have mentioned this on LinkedIn, I think it upset a few people when I mentioned it, but yeah, I'm not here to upset people. It's I'm just telling you what the research says. So with an online with an online assessment, you're obviously not in the room with the invigilator. So it's very, very open to cheating. So pre-COVID, there was a lot of research going on around, you know, because you know that isn't that um, it's relatively new, isn't it? So I think Donovan McKay was sort of one of the leading sort of researchers around um online assessment and whether people cheat, and then COVID happened. Now, when COVID happens, the whole world's education systems have to go online for a little bit. So these Ivy School, you know, these Brown, Yale, Stanford, MIT, you know, everyone that's uh paid an awful lot of money for their qualifications is now doing exams online, and there was a lot of research going on around that. And funny enough, uh, I think it was Philip Newton, who's from the Swansea Medical University's medical school. He did a load of research, so you can you can look that up. So Philip Newton, and what they found and discovered was cheating goes through the roof. Now that word does sound a bit horrible, doesn't it? Cheating, but there's a lot of psychological research around cheating. Um I'm trying to think who the psychologist, you got the fraud triangle, I suppose, is the most well-known one. Donald Cressy from the 1950s, so that's quite old research. You know, the uh people will cheat, and I think there were three things. Um, opportunity is one of them. So if there's the opportunity to cheat, and we're talking about moral people, you know, so they just you know they discovered that even moral people will cheat if there's opportunity. Rationalisation is the other one, and then pressure high stakes. So if you're paying for a qualification and paying quite good money, there is then pressure to cheat if the opportunity uh exists. So there was a lot of research around during COVID about online assessment, and A, it's quite easy to cheat, and if it is easy to cheat, people do cheat. So there's uh an industry called proctoring. P-R-O-C, oh don't get me dispelled, I'm just fixing proctoring. So basically it's like in individualized individualization, and there's these proctoring systems. So in our country, I think UCAS, so the awarding organizations that are going to start using proctoring will use a very minimal proctoring system. So, what that will mean is when you do your online exam, you'll be sat at your computer, your webcam will be on, so it's looking at you, and the other side of the computer, a bit like a Zoom call, there'll be someone watching you take that exam. They'll be watching multiple people. Now, there'll be lots of people that won't cheat. There'll be lots of people that are very, very enthusiastic about what they've learned and they want to prove to themselves they know it. But it's also open to cheating, even with that uh proctoring system in place where someone's looking at you through your webcam. This has been researched. This is why in in America, uh during COVID, the proctoring industry went from something like a 300 million pound industry to a multi-billion pound industry overnight. Uh, you even had like uh teams would come around and sweep your home for electronic devices. You'd have to have cameras installed in the room. So it wasn't just your webcam camera, there'd be about two other cameras placed around the room. You would have to download software onto your computer that would recognise if a mobile phone was in a it within a certain distance to your computer. Because if you think about it, you know, you could be at your computer. If it's just the webcam looking at you, you could have your computer wired up to your TV screen, so all the questions are coming on your TV screen. You could have someone behind your computer who's seeing the questions coming up and just pointing to A, B, or C or D. It's very, you know, with these minimum proctoring systems, it is going to be quite easy to cheat if you want to cheat. So we've kind of jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. So a lot of very, very good, well-meaning people uh are now involved in the training sector and have written some good courses, some great content. But remember, learning's not about the content. The ownership of learning is always on the learner. Always. You want to try and inspire that learner to want to learn, to have the passion to keep learning. You know, if they come away from a course, whether it's online or face-to-face, to think, well, I didn't really understand it. What do I do now? Do I chat to people about it? Do I keep researching it? You want to inspire that passion because it's not always that you know, content's good, it helps have good content and correct content, but that's not really what engenders learning. The ownership of learning is always on the learner. Someone once said you can't do uh learning's a bit like breathing. You can't do it for someone, you know, you can't breathe for someone, same as like you can't learn for someone, it's the ownership is completely on the learner. So it looks like we're shifting to these online assessment models where we are going to have a proctoring system, but it's still going to be possible and quite easy to cheat. And if people find ways to cheat, they will. And if you look at our sector, unfortunately, you if you look at a lot of the gas engineers out there, they're going on their five-yearly courses, most of them want to guess just get it passed. So they will tend to go to the centres where they know they're always going to get passed, you know, and and if we if we're designing systems that are going to prove competence to a workforce that already, bless them, is low-skilled, and it's arguably not their fault, you know, we're going to probably have some issues. So anyone involved in that, whether you're the award-on-line organisation like NOCN, you know, thinking about these proctoring systems, you know, we're not going to be able to afford the high-level proctoring systems they've got for Ivy League universities. You know, you can't have people coming around sweeping your home and downloading software onto your computer so you know if your mobile is in the vicinity and having cameras set up everywhere. That's not going to work. So we're going to have to try and think of ways to attenuate cheating, it will happen. Because you know, we we've all been complaining, and all these good people that get involved in training now have been you know quite rightly saying, look, something's wrong in our sector, you know, the way we we we assess competence is completely wrong, it's pay to pass. But like I say, we could be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire bit here because we've still, in my opinion, it's got this pay-to-passing. If people have paid very, very good money to do a course and it's now being online assessed, if they think they can get away with it and pass it, they're gonna get away with it and pass it. So we've kind of haven't solved the problem. Um, so hopefully the people involved in that, yeah, we've got to think about that and uh yeah, maybe look at the research that's around that. Well, I hope that helped. Uh, I'm gonna now go and do my LinkedIn post for the beginning of the week to sort of say what some of my guild engineers are doing. I know some are one of them's carrying on with a heliotherm cascade. So heliotherm is a is a manufacturer of a heat pump. I know another one, one of the guild engineers, they've got a crane in to they've got to lift their 13 kilowatt Wisman onto a I think they've got to lift it onto the flat roof and then it's getting fixed to the wall. Um, one of the other engineers they're starting an 18-year-old apprentice today. Uh, another one of my guild engineers works for the Crown, and so I think they're doing a swimming pool uh heat pump today. Um lots of air-to-air. So I've got a couple of the quite a few of the guild engineers that are uh getting involved with a lot of air-to-wear systems, um, not under the bus. Um, some water mains. So there's a couple of engineers I know in in in the London area are replacing lots of lead water mains. There's still 9.5 million lead pipes out there. A lot of us are still drinking lead. Um, we've got lots of first fix going on, we've got a valent five kilowatt going on. Um, install, uh, we've got a Bosch air to wear multi-split going in by another engineer, lots of commissioning. Um, so it's all going on. The guild engineers are out there working hard. Wish them luck and thank you very much for listening.