CiLCA review

The Certificate in Local Council Administration (CiLCA) is the qualification clerks need to be recognised as 'qualified' for the purposes of exercising the General Power of Competence and for Quality Council Status (also being reviewed for relaunch next year as Local Council Award). CiLCA is undergoing a thorough review, the national Improvement and Development Board (IDB) met recently and a number of decisions were made about the CiLCA refresh. Below is a summary of the key updates:

Understanding the changes to CiLCA
The key message is that there is one CiLCA. There are no versions or years that are better or worse – eg if you are qualified under CiLCA 3 years ago you have the same quality qualification as someone who will take it next year.

This focus helped shape a number of decisions:

• There will not be a ‘bridging module’ or anything similar to bring those with an older CiLCA qualification ‘up to date’.
• There will not be a CiLCA ‘Finance bolt-on’ or similar proposed optional additions.
• There will be no exemptions – all students will have to complete the full set of tasks
• There will not be an option to register for the refreshed CiLCA before launch. This is because the current CiLCA is still a valid and valuable qualification. Our advice is that if clerks would like to be qualified under CiLCA they should go ahead and register with the existing CiLCA rather than waiting for the refreshed version to launch

Time frames 

• We aim to launch CiLCA 2015 on 1 April. This is still tbc subject to scoping how long it would take to set up the new assessment process.
• Students currently registering for CiLCA will have 2 years to complete the current version.
•  Registrations received after 1 January 2015 will have 1 year to complete the current version.
•  Applications after 1 April (tbc) will enter CiLCA 2015.
•  CiLCA 2015 will have a one year time limit to complete after registration. With the option to extend as in the current existing arrangements.

Assessment and verification

•  The existing processes and assessment team will continue with the current CiLCA version until the final candidate has completed
•  A key difference of CiLCA 2015 will be how it is assessed and verified. The aim being a more flexible approach where candidates are more likely to pass first time
•  To reflect our commitment to this, the fee for CiLCA 2015 will include the cost of the first resit. This will be trialled for a year and then re-assessed.