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it. Largely on the grounds that so much of its [City & Guilds’] activity fell
outside regulation. And also because it was willing to hive off its GNVQs, and
again, putting it bluntly, to sell them off. ...Had City & Guilds joined AQA in
the way that ...Cambridge joined with RSA and Edexcel was created out of the
merger of BTEC and London, then you would have had a much more tidy
situation than now.
(AQA2 2003)
This statement infers that had City & Guilds joined the AQA merger, the three
awarding bodies would have been more powerful. Without the authority of the
vocational awarding body which provided a huge volume of workplace qualifications,
the unitary awarding bodies lacked the power to withstand the centripetal force
exerted by QCA and the DfES. Unification may have brought about a reduction in the
number of awarding bodies, but it has not brought about any discernible bridging of
the academic∕vocational gap - possibly because of the very large vocational fish that
got away.
Unifying the products
A principal objective of the Dearing recommendations was to bring together
vocational and academic qualifications under the roof of the same awarding body in
order that the established reputation of the examining boards could confer higher
status on vocational qualifications. A less publicised side-effect of this unification was
the required reduction of syllabuses to be offered by the unitary awarding bodies. The
limitations proposed on the number of syllabuses to be offered caused little comment
outside the examining boards, perhaps because of concerns about comparability
between subjects and between Boards. The justification for the reduction was based
on Sir Ron Dearing’s suggestion that:
The regulatory bodies, working in partnership with the awarding bodies, should
reduce the number of syllabuses and options to levels where it is practical for
them to be satisfied that equal standards prevail...while preserving a
reasonable choice for centres.