Award certificate holder

We British may be accused of being seriously underskilled but, by golly, nobody can say we don't have enough qualifications -- so many, actually, that no one has managed to count them. Some pundits say there are 16,000, others 25,000.

The latest edition of the splendid British Vocational Qualifications published by Kogan Page calls it a day lust after 3,500. Every imaginable assessable procedure is packed into its 553 pages: anaesthetic techniques, envelope manufacture, saw-milling, racehorse care, leakage control... You are left wondering what legal activity could be left to slap a certificate on.

There are a number of ways of trying to get a handle on this squirming multitude. Simplest of them is to look at the three major qualification-awarding bodies: City & Guilds, Edexcel and OCR. Each is an amalgamation. C&G, the leading purveyor of vocational qualifications, now includes Pitman, the shorthand people. Edexcel embraces the Business and Technician Education Council (BTEC). And OCR stands for Oxford Cambridge and RSA Examinations, an amalgamation of the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate and the RSA Examinations Board, the former credited with having started public examinations for schools in 1858, the latter with introducing vocational examinations for people who had left school in 1856.

But identifying the big three hardly takes matters much further since there is so much shared territory and duplication, and little turf that each has managed to fence off exclusively as its own. And there are numerous professional bodies and trade associations -- from the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Industry Board to the Worshipful Company of Saddlers -- which bestow their own "occupational" awards.

Of all the periodic attempts to rationalise vocational qualifications, perhaps the one that gave birth to the NVQ, or National Vocational Qualification, in the mid-1980s made clearest tracks through the jungle. No need to foist this newcomer on the awarding bodies, ran the theory. The fond assumption was that NVQs would be so desirable that the awarding bodies would hammer and tap their awards into line with them -- and, if this didn't happen, the punters would spurn the old awards for the new anyway.

What was to be really new about NVQs, levels 1 to 5, was that they were to be "competence-based", a wording bound to raise hackles with its implication that existing qualifications were incompetence-based. The holder of an NVQ was supposed, as the now defunct Manpower Services Commission put it, to have demonstrated the "ability to perform activities in the jobs within an occupation to the standards expected in employment". Getting an NVQ would be an essentially practical process, often achieved on the job, and wouldn't demand dull old classroom learning and pen-and-paper tests.

Inevitably, this approach and the image of assessors ticking boxes on checklists as young people went through the various stages of answering a telephone or making a cheese sandwich led to the alternative interpretation of the initials: Not Very Qualified.

Another misjudged assumption in Whitehall was that the new vocational qualifications would bury the BTECs, which had been one result of the previous attempt, at the end of the 1960s, to make sense of vocational awards. Throughout the 1970s, the BTECs had covered the occupational landscape and come to offer a new path to higher education from humble BTEC first certificate to BTEC national certificate through to BTEC higher national certificates and diplomas, better known as HNCs and HNDs.

Over the NVQs' first decade nearly 800 NVQs were established and 95 per cent of occupations were covered, but their critics emphasised the low or zero demand for about half of them. About 50 accounted for roughly 85 per cent of certificates awarded in those first ten years. The sceptics also noted that most of these popular NVQs were direct substitutes, with a bit of rejigging, of established awards that the City & Guilds had been running for years. C&G had dutifully turned many of its staple craft qualifications into NVQs.

There were problems with a qualification that was so specialised. Many young people sensed that their employment prospects would be better with more general qualifications. Many who started NVQs in employment didn't finish them because their jobs changed and they no longer needed the skills they were required to demonstrate.

Nonetheless, the NVQ had its supporters and when first the Conservatives and then Labour decided to revive apprenticeships, NVQs became the key component of the "modern apprenticeship", which unlike the old oily-rag engineering-rooted model would straddle every conceivable occupation. In the mid-1990s, the five levels of NVQ laid down a track for another attempt to make sense of the situation and achieve "parity of esteem" between applied and academic qualifications. The result of Sir Ron Dearing's review in 1996 was a "national framework of qualifications". According to this, an NVQ1 and a GCSE at grade D to G were both to be on the first "foundation" rung of the ladder. On the second "intermediate" rung sat GCSE at grades A to C and an NVQ 2, while an A-level and an NVQ3 occupied the third "advanced" level. Climbing to levels 4 and 5 and you were into "higher" territory, where perched the NVQs 4 and 5, HNCs and HNDs.

The framework had another thread running up it: the foundation, intermediate and advanced General National Vocational Qualifications (GNVQs). These entered the soup in the early 1990s when it became clear that the NVQs had not elbowed BTEC nationals off the scene as the sole full-time educational alternatives to A-levels. The three main vocational bodies would be able to award the new GNVQs. breaking BTEC's monopoly. They were not only supposed to prepare their takers for employment and lead into the more specific NVQs, but were going to be "of equal standing with academic qualifications" at the same level. They were classified under a number of broad occupational headings such as business, leisure and tourism, and health and social care.

GNVQs found a market in colleges and schools. But rather than stamping a defiantly vocational path, they have afforded an alternative route to higher education for many with GCSE grades lower than those usually required for A-levels. So in 2000, Labour announced the end of advanced and intermediate GNVQs and welcomed new "vocational" A-levels and GCSEs.

But nothing is that simple. The new qualifications have been beset with problems. The final death notice on the stubbornly resistant GNVQ has been postponed to 2006.