Mark Joseph MIfL, MICPHE, RP

In 1984, when he was 16, Mark Joseph went on a college plumbing course, which he didn’t complete. He continued to work in the trade nonetheless, but some nine years later he decided to get himself the education he felt he had missed, returning to college at 25. “I realised I couldn’t write very well. They found I was mildly dyslexic” he says.

He found techniques to overcome dyslexia, and went from college to The London Guildhall University, where he took an Honours degree in Geography and Sociology before doing a PGCE at Goldsmiths College, London. “The training was excellent – it was one of my favourite times” he says, then teaching Geography in London secondary schools. “I helped a lot of cash-strapped teachers get their plumbing in order” he says.

And when in 2005, he decide to move on from school teaching after six years, it was plumbing he returned to – but this time he wanted to have the qualifications he had missed out on first time around. He took City & Guilds Level 3, at The College of Northwest London, and then applied for a position teaching Plumbing at Havering College of Further and Higher Education. He’s now a full time lecturer and an assessor, and runs his own one-man plumbing business at evenings and weekends.

“I love teaching” he says. “I love the interaction with students, the banter, the friendships, and the fact that you see someone grow and develop, just as you see a plumbing system grow as a plumber.” So he wants to be good at it, and keeps his teaching techniques up-to-the-minute. The CPD he declares to IfL gives him the latest thinking on such matters as discrimination, disability and race.

But however good you are at teaching, what you teach needs to be cutting edge too. The Chartered Institute of Plumbing and Heating Engineering (CIPHE) provides Mark with a monthly CPD session – they run these through branches all over the country, as well as offering CPD through their journal. “It keeps you abreast of changes in the profession” he says. “You can easily get out of date, not being on site all the time. Students will say, I’ve just installed one of these, and you’ve never seen it.”

Both IfL and CIPHE require 30 hours CPD a year. “It’s a bit of a juggling act, doing CPD in both teaching and plumbing at the same time, but worth it.”

All the same, he does wonder whether those who decide on plumbing training need to change it so often. “Plumbing needs to develop a cutting edge curriculum, up to date and relevant, that would help.”

Customers are more inclined to trust a CIPHE-registered plumber, and that matters to all of us, because “the plumber of the future will be at the forefront of the carbon agenda” according to chief executive Blane Judd.

New greener technologies are going to have to go into existing housing stock, he says – it is no good just putting them in new houses, because 80 per cent of existing stock will still be standing in 2050. “The plumber must embrace new technologies and help the consumer to do so.”