Patrolling the borders: accreditation in further and higher education in England

Abstract

Further education has very different accreditation arrangements than the higher education sector. There are no convincing rationales for these differences; they stem from history, and have often arisen as a result of other decisions on the organization and funding of the two sectors. The overlapping territory between further and higher education is examined, and a gradual shift to HE modes of accreditation is noted. It is suggested that this may be a result of a tendency to put a higher premium on lateral stratifications between levels of education, and less on vertical organizations by discipline, styles of education or occupational sector. However, there are some countervailing tendencies in both sectors.

Notes

1. In this the Learning and Skills Act (2000) departed from the previous Further and Higher Education Act (1992) under which the Further Education Funding Council (the LSC's predecessor in funding further education) had its own inspectorate.

2. I am a little cautious about using this argument to embrace skill as well as knowledge, since it is not clear to me that skill can be codified in at all the same way as can be done with knowledge.

3. HESA figures for 2002–2003 show 917,000 students (out of a total of 1,900,000) in the obviously vocational categories of medicine and allied subjects; veterinary science; agriculture and related subjects; computer science; engineering; architecture, building and planning; law; business and administrative studies; and teacher training. No doubt others in areas such as creative arts are pursuing studies primarily in order to enter a related industry sector.

4. For example, the FEFC could hardly have credibly used qualifications measures to account for its own performance had its own inspectorate been responsible for accrediting those qualifications.

5. ‘Other undergraduate’ in terms of the categorization of the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), and Level 4+ in terms of the classification of the Learning and Skills Council.

6. 2001–2002 figures, from Parry et al. (2003), table 1. Students studying for ‘other institutional credits’ have been excluded.

7. Expressing the 338,000 students studying for sub‐degree higher qualifications in Parry et al. (2003) as a proportion of the total of 2,446,000 further and higher education students studying below full degree level (LSC, 2004; and table 1 of Parry et al.) accounting for overlap.

8. For some reason HNCs had already transferred to the HEFC for Wales in 1992.

9. The bulk being in the business sector, and 30% being NVQs at Levels 4 and 5. The Association of Accounting Technician's NVQ 4 accounted for 10% of the total. A series of awards by chartered institutes (cf. marketing, personnel, management) also feature.

10. Though ‘pure’ NVQs are more frequently offered outside the further education colleges than within them, the occupational standards on which they are based have informed many other vocational education programmes, including for example BTECs and City and Guilds progression awards.

11. Though the very multiplicity of these ‘lines’ arguably gets in the way of progression for the individual student. See West and Steedman (2003).

12. Industrial training boards, created in the 1960s, industry training organizations and lead bodies established in the 1980s, and the national training organizations of the 1990s.

13. Such systems are familiar in general education in Europe, with qualifications such as the French baccalaureate, the German hochschulreife, Swedish high school leaving certificates, etc, all marking a ‘graduation’ from upper secondary education, and in many cases used to denote positions in society. Interestingly, these certificates—like our university degrees—are often closely bound up with the type of institution an individual has attended.