Writing a book about NCVQ qualifications is a demanding task because they are subject to such rapid change. This work, which judging by references must have gone to press in autumn 1995, shows only too clearly how quickly comment can be overtaken by events.
The core of this volume consists of a 45-page section by Tony Tysome that seeks to describe National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) and General National Vocational Qualifications (GNVQs), to trace their development, to consider the problems to which they give rise, and their implications for various topics. These include the academic/vocational divide, credit accumulation and transfer and their relationship to professional bodies. Despite the breathless style, Tysome provides a useful, if familiar, survey of his topic. Sadly, this is sometimes marred by repetition and journalistic cliche such as the comment that Alan Smithers's criticisms of vocational qualifications were "featured on prime-time television".
Tysome's piece is preceded by a section written by the other two authors rather bizarrely entitled, "Contextualisng Tysome". This consists of a canter through writers ranging from Comenius and Alvin Toffler to the CBI, touches aspects of the history of British education and the development of the Conservative government's policy on training as well as notions such as "post-Fordism", "postmodernism" and the "learning society". Having devoted some 20 pages to the not-unfamiliar view that we now live in a post-Fordist world, the authors deftly reconcile this with the claim that NVQs are "classically Fordist" by the statement that "the loss of Fordism in one area of society may therefore be compensated for by its reemergence in another".
Despite the authors' allusions to a myriad topics of doubtful relevance to their subject, they almost entirely fail to consider two developments central to the future of vocational qualifications. They make no mention of the work on the assessment of GNVQs led by John Capey and almost no mention of that on the 100 top NVQS headed by Gordon Beaumont. Although neither group was to report until after this book had gone to press, both had been established in the spring of 1995 and the significance of their eventual impact had been widely recognised.
This slender - if not waif-like - volume consists of 128 pages. Given that most of its 17 sections begin at least a quarter way down the page and that the text on page 13 ends before reaching this point, it would seem that only 61 pages have been written by the authors themselves. At Pounds 32.50 this seems less than a bargain. The publication of such a lightweight book may, perhaps, be an unexpected instance of Smithers's view, reported on page 61, that the new vocational qualifications were giving rise to a new industry.
Peter Wright is assistant director, Higher Education Quality Council.
Beyond Competence: The NCVQ Framework and the Challenge to Higher Education in the New Millennium
Author - K. Gokulsing, Patrick Ainley and Tony Tysome
ISBN - 1 85972 351 9
Publisher - Avebury
Price - £32.50
Pages - 128
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