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Although it is undeniably interesting to note the choice of language with which the
City & Guilds negotiator’s actions have been described by those involved, the more
important factor is how the principal actors underlined the enduring impact of City &
Guilds’ withdrawal. A view from a member of another vocational awarding body was
that City & Guilds’ ‘escape’ was due to a lack of genuine government commitment to
bridging the academic∕vocational divide:
...Some of the bodies, and RSA was one, had a vision that nevertheless they
wanted to enable a seamless web, if you like, of qualifications. Edexcel had
already taken the plunge; RSA chose to do so, whereas City & Guilds took the
opposite view. It simply sloughed off GNVQ and carried on. If they
[government] had been serious about trying to alleviate the difference between
academic and vocational qualifications, they wouldn ,t have set up a structure
that allowed that to happen.
(OCRl 2000)
That individual was predisposed to take that view because of his disappointment that
NVQs had not been included within the unitary awarding bodies’ remit, as cited in an
earlier excerpt from his interview.
Supporting that view of City & Guilds’ action as having foiled the governmental
objective was the cautiously phrased observation of a QCA official who obliquely
seemed to suggest that City & Guilds had indeed foiled the regulator’s intentions:
I presume that they broadly agreed with the philosophy that a degree of
rationalisation, and certainly a greater degree of coherence between the
general and the vocational was desirable. So they went along with it and, apart
from all the sort of difficulties of deciding which partner to work with, there
didn’t seem to be any objection in principle to the idea of that degree of
unification. The City & Guilds story is an interesting one, of course ...and it
continues, of course, in the context of.... [The sentence was unfinished.]
(QCA2 2003)
To another who had been involved in the negotiations, it seemed evident that:
...there was clearly an outside driver for those three parties to come together as
AQA, and to ensure that they had some arrangement that would enable them to
work together - that arrangement being the Joint Venture which finally
emerged, but a Joint Venture from which City & Guilds um... actually
‘wriggled out ’ I think is the only word you can use. He wriggled his way out of