The English Examining Boards: Their route from independence to government outsourcing agencies

131

This opened the way for such post-16 initiatives as the City & Guilds ‘365’ pre-
VocationaI courses, the Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education (CPVE) and the pre-
16 curriculum initiatives developed through the Technical and Vocational Education
Initiative (TVEI), a project of the government’s Manpower Services Commission, not
the Department of Education and Science.

The rationale for these courses was that young people who were not yet ready for the
specific vocational training of BTEC courses could profit from continuing their
general education within an applied rather than a theoretical framework. This
approach was based on the FEU concept of learning. Richard Pring’s analysis
summed up the essence of what he termed "the pro-vocational tradition” as
recognising the importance of relevance for the learner as distinct from the traditional
view of education as concerned solely with the perfection of the intellect. (Pring 1997:
124) Assignment-led and resource-based rather than teacher-centred, the assessment
scheme profiled a range of achievements rather than depending on a single
examination grade. However, it was to be the overly flexible nature of the assessment
of these courses that proved to be their Achilles’ heel. Lacking external validation of
the final certificates, the whole pre-vocational movement suffered from a fatal
weakness in a society afflicted with the ‘diploma disease’. In 1991 a new ‘general
vocational’ course structure was devised that proved somewhat more successful. The
examining boards were eventually called in to lend it their assessment gravitas.

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