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interviewees that perhaps the most significant and lasting effect of the whole episode
was the exit of City & Guilds from the AQA Joint Venture.
While the three unitary awarding bodies were subject to the ever-increasing
regulatory prescription which was diminishing their professional freedom, City &
Guilds acted so as to retain its liberty as an Institute established by Royal Charter and
therefore beyond the reach of the threats to withdraw accreditation which were able to
bring the AEB and NEAB to heel. This had been its stance throughout its history. As
late as the 1986-87 annual report, the Director-General “stressed City and Guilds’
own independence as the Institute ,s greatest asset”. Catherine Bush, in her case study
of City and Guilds, described its position:
...It was established and operated in the self help and voluntaristic spirit of the
[Victorian] age. The style of government was non- interventionist and liberal.
C&G was a model of this approach. From its inception C&G’s activity
displayed a dual nature; to provide service to current industrial needs and
structures and although independent, to provide a mechanism for the
implementation of government policy.
(Bush 1993: 10)
Bush identifies the tensions resulting from “The initiative to develop NVQs and
latterly GNVQs [which] has marked the intervention and involvement of Government
in vocational qualifications which is unprecedented” (Bush 1993: 5). It was the threat
of further government intervention which City & Guilds foresaw if it were to
relinquish its independent status to form a unitary awarding body that caused it to
withdraw from AQA.
In the opinion of one observer, as the Dearing Report and then Guaranteeing
Standards aimed to ensure parity of esteem between academic and vocational
qualifications, “the model very much looked to at that point was three vocational
boards” (AQA 203). If that was indeed the basis of the desired number of unitary