13. The Settlement Agreement October 1988

On March 31, 1988, the full Executive Council of the IPA met at Linden Hall in Longhorsley, in the north of England, in connection with the week-long IPA Symposium. As expected, the progress of the lawsuit and the planning and procedural recommendations of the Hanly Committee on Admission of New Groups were central agenda items. The completed report (dated March 1988) of the New Groups Committee was available ahead of time to all Executive Council members. This report was substantially the same as the earlier drafts discussed in detail in the preceding chapter, but now with consensus on the precise recommendations to be brought to the Executive Council on the evaluation procedures for both the training groups (the independent Societies and Institutes) and their individual members. As outlined in detail in the preceding chapter, the intent was to develop a fair and workable assessment process that would nonetheless ensure the maintenance of the IPA's minimum training standards. This eliminated automatic grandfathering based only on achieved status within the applicant groups, and substituted grandfathering based on the conception of demonstrated “functional equivalence” of training and competence, yet devised to be feasible in terms of IPA resources of manpower and money available to the task.

First, of course, the quality of the group functioning would have to be assured: “There can be no question of grandfathering [individuals] or upgrading [remedial activities by those who fell short of meeting the grandfathering criteria] unless the academic quality of the Society or Institute itself, and of its training program, is acceptable.” But as indicated in the earlier discussion of this issue, assessment procedures for group functioning had been well established over years of activity by Site Visit Committees of the IPA (and also of the American) and would pose no special problem or undue drain on resources when being applied directly to these new applicant groups. At thi