England Standards Board

- Newsflash - new courses endorsed in Manchester, Winchester and Sussex - see full list of endorsed courses -

Welcome to the website of the England Standards Board for Community Development Training and Qualifications. Known as the ESB for short! 

The ESB has been developed by community workers and training providers, to provide a way of ensuring and recognising quality community development work learning programmes.

This is particularly important as there are often training courses advertised as suitable for community development activists and workers which are not at all related to the key purpose of community development work (click here to see the key purpose).

ESB is recognised by LLUK (Lifelong Learning UK) as the endorsing body for all Community Development Work Learning.

We provide a peer based endorsement process for Community Development Work learning - courses and work based programmes – at all levels. We endorse accredited and non-accredited programmes.

We take as the base for our requirements the national occupational standards for community development work as that ensures that we are training people to undertake the roles and responsibilities that it has been agreed are the province of community development workers (paid or unpaid). Click here to see how the National Occupational Standards fit into what the England Standards Board does.

We take the view that endorsement is about development and well as meeting standards at a point in time. So we encourage programmes to tell us about their innovative and good practice, and to learn from others, both in their submission document and in the annual updates.  As we develop this web site so we will be posting examples from endorsed programmes.

Working towards endorsement often provides the trigger to add in additional aspects which will improve the learning for participants.  We can give full endorsement for 5 years with suggestions for improvement, or a one year conditional endorsement to give programmes time to update some policies or to develop new systems.

We also learn form what programmes are doing and sometimes we use them to develop good practice guidelines which will also be posted onto the web, and these can inform changes to the submission guidance and submission forms.

On the this site you will find information on how to get endorsed, what courses we endorse and other work we do. Click on the map above to see what courses ESB endorses in the different regions of England.