From its rather wobbly beginnings 20 years ago, the national vocational qualification has consolidated its position as a familiar badge of competence in the workplace. Old jibes linger, though. In some quarters, the quip dating from its launch period can still be heard – that what NVQ really stands for is: not very qualified.
But today the award has finally achieved academic respect. After long deliberation, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) has included an NVQ in its tariff, which measures the value of qualifications offered by candidates for higher education.
Anyone with a level 3 NVQ awarded by the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) is holding 160 points, the Ucas has decreed. That is 40 points more than an A-grade A-level. If you apply to a university with this NVQ, the institution should – in theory – be happy to count it alongside A-levels or other qualifications.
At the AAT, there has, understandably, been quiet jubilation. “The NVQ has been put to the test,” says Jane Scott Paul, the AAT’s chief executive. “There’s a lot of talk about parity of esteem between academic and vocational. This is the first time that an NVQ has gone through the rigorous process and come out the other end favourably compared with A-levels.”
The sentiment was echoed at Ucas. “It is significant,” says the director of policy, Jill Johnson. “It’s recognition that a qualification that has been primarily for employment purposes is relevant for progression into higher education.”
Ucas is anxious to stress, however, that its decision does not indicate an opening of the floodgates. “This is only for the AAT’s NVQ,” she says. “We’re not saying that is necessarily the case for all NVQs.”
The decision is undoubtedly a triumph for the AAT, but there is more than a pinch of irony involved. While Ucas has put its NVQ to the test, the association has been plugging its own qualifications as an alternative to university.
As the debt burden on students in higher education has mounted, the AAT has been making an increasingly attractive case to teenagers. Young people going down the AAT route will emerge better off than their graduate counterparts to the tune of roughly £55,000 by the age of 21, says the organisation. They won’t have debts. On the contrary, they will have been earning in that time. They will also boast a three-year or longer head-start on the graduates in terms of work experience.
The AAT trumpets the case of Karen Sands, who at 20 became the youngest person in the world to have qualified as a chartered accountant. She left school at 16 to take a job with an Oxford accountancy firm, which sponsored her to train with the AAT. She duly coasted through its NVQ level 4. By 21, Sands was lecturing accounting to university graduates.
The AAT is unabashed at any suggestion that it is trying to have things both ways. Indeed it sees this as a virtue. “We already had a well-developed route into the higher levels of the profession,” says Scott Paul. “This gives us another option, through an academic pathway.”
Higher education is being encouraged by the government to cast its nets wider for students and should eagerly grasp the 160-point NVQ as a tool for this, she says. “This offers them an opportunity to recruit people who have come via a workplace, rather than a traditional academic route.”
Whether universities embrace the accounting NVQ remains to be seen. None of them has to. “The tariff is merely a tool for universities to make use of,” Johnson says. “It will have influence because it’s a very easy tool to use, but just because a qualification has a number of points, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a university will accept somebody with it.”
Some universities will undoubtedly accept the NVQ. A number already accept candidates with less paper evidence of their abilities, or admit applicants bearing vocational credentials that are not on the Ucas tariff.
Moreover, Ucas would not have gone through the process of approving the AAT NVQ without solid assurance from a reasonable number of universities that they would regard it as a viable entry qualification. “Before we start work to bring any qualification into the tariff, we get an awarding body to take soundings in higher education as to whether or not they wish that qualification to be included,” says Johnson.
“We wouldn’t start work on bringing an award into the tariff just because we’ve had a request. We do require an indication from some part of higher education. In some instances that might be a quite specialist part.”
The AAT’s is the first NVQ to have been accepted onto the tariff on its own. Ucas is also going through the same process with two advanced apprenticeships, in engineering and e-skills, as part of a general process to broaden university entry. The apprenticeships are “frameworks” – that is, each consists of a number of elements, including an NVQ. The final decision on them has not yet been made, but they are thought to be in with a solid chance of acceptance.
Again, as with the AAT NVQ, acceptance of these two apprenticeships would not give the green light for all apprenticeships, which vary almost as widely in their complexity as do NVQs.
“What we looked for in apprenticeships were those that were most likely to offer progression into higher education,” says Johnson. “It was agreed that those two areas would be a starting point because we knew that there was some progression into higher education from those apprenticeships already. There are fewer opportunities from something like hairdressing.”
