Moira Fraser-Steele joins Design Council

Industry Lead Body for Design director Moira Fraser-Steele has joined the Design Council this week as assistant director of its Education and Training Foundation.

The council’s former director of education, Richard Shearman, has succeeded Fraser-Steele as director at the ILBD. Shearman had been chairman of the ILBD for the past 18 months.

The complicated job swop comes seven months after Shearman was made redundant in the council restructuring (DW 24 June 1994). Fraser-Steele was director of the ILBD from its inception in 1990.

The final pieces of the jigsaw will be in place when the ILBD appoints a new chairman – within a week, says Shearman – and when the Design Council recruits Fraser-Steele’s boss, the director of its Education and Training Foundation.

Fraser-Steele says her new post is a “tremendous challenge”.

Meanwhile, Shearman starts his new job this week with the triple targets of finalising standards for design NVQs (National Vocational Qualifications), marketing NVQs to the design industry, and setting up a training body to administer and assess the NVQs.

Most important, he says, is establishing the new body, with the Chartered Society of Designers and the Design Business Association, so that it has the support of the design industry and the Employment Department.

“It is going to have a much wider role than the lead body,” comments Shearman. “The ILBD will come to a natural end, with its functions, such as reviewing NVQs, absorbed into the new body.

“We will be moving towards that this year but there are various hurdles to jump over, including the question of funding.”

Shearman adds: “Moira has done a terrific amount of work developing design NVQs. Now there is a big challenge to make sure they are taken up and recognised by the industry as valuable. There is quite a lot of evangelising and marketing to do.”