Ten years ago, the Government set up a review of vocational qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland which started a wholesale re-organisation of post-compulsory education and training.

The introduction of National Vocational Qualifications, followed in 1992 by General National Vocational Qualifications, was intended to provide three pathways to excellence. Academic awards (A-levels and general degrees) are now balanced by education-based GNVQs and job-specific NVQs, at all levels.

Looking back 10 or even five years, it is hard to find a single protest against this attempt to rationalise qualifications. Education and training, it was agreed, were seriously undervalued in English society, and participation rates must be increased. A reformed, transparent system would make qualifications more valued and so morepopular.

The general argument remains largely unchallenged, yet we enter 1995 to achorus of criticism of both GNVQs and NVQs. Report after report - including those of the Welsh and English HMIs - has identified major and persistent problems.

Quality control is inadequate; the assessment system for GNVQs is unnecessarily complex; and NVQs are overloaded with prescriptive content. Reform here is urgent but also easy, given the political will. However, there are also more fundamental problems.

Ten years from the start of the NVQ system, two things are now clearer than they were at the time. The first is that our economy is increasingly one of short-term contracts and rapid job changes.

Our vocational qualifications system pays lip service to the idea of transferable skills and flexibility.

But, in fact, NVQs in the workplace depend on employers’ and employees’ ability to make long-term commitments - reflecting the work environment of the civil service, not that of the National Council for Vocational Qualifications’ clientele.

The second point is that the needs and interests of young people are very different from those of adult workers. Our system does not recognise this. NVQs and GNVQ are meant to be assessed to exactly the same standards, for exactly the same content, wherever and whenever they are used. But making no distinction between a 16-year-old school-leaver in college and an experienced adult in the workplace serves neither well.

After the age of 30, most people, even if they change jobs frequently, do so within a fairly circumscribed area. Moreover, when adults seek and are offered work, they have a “work history” which, over time, becomes more and more important compared with formal qualifications.

Young people, by contrast, have no work history, and only a few have fixed career plans. Many want higher education before going to work; all are conscious of rapid economic change and job insecurity. They need to convince a wide range of potential selectors and employers that they are able, and can be trained quickly. They want to keep their options open, and they want to get ahead of their contemporaries and rivals in the sorting and selection process.

Little wonder that young people have been so unconvinced about narrow, ungraded NVQs. The Government originally envisaged a simple bi-partite qualification system with only two strands, academic and vocational. But in the 1970s and early 1980s it was the more general, semi-vocational BTEC awards that were fast-growing, not traditional occupational ones.

It was the continued enthusiasm for BTEC awards, and lack of take-up of NVQs, which convinced government that, after all, GNVQs were needed. And it is this underlying, well-founded demand for general awards that explains the rapid growth of GNVQ enrolment, not the inherent quality of the courses or awards themselves.

Unfortunately, even with GNVQs two major problems remain. Firstly, there is still a need for more specific vocational awards, other than NVQs in their current form. Second, GNVQs themselves need significant change.

GNVQs are only vocational in a loose sense. They are designed for full-time courses. They are intentionally very broad, with a limited number of titles planned and are overwhelmingly classroom-based.

We are creating a new educational option for 16-19 year olds. Nonetheless, some young people will still want specific vocational training. They may postpone it to 17, 18 or beyond. Many who train will spend only part of their lives in that occupation, through choice or economic change. But chefs, engineers, plumbers and doctors remain heavily in demand and need training, though not just for today’s specific job.

Recent Further Education Unit research indicates that NVQ enrolments make up a very small proportion of current college students. Many other FE students pursue awards which are vocationally specific but avowedly not NVQs. It is striking that National Certificates are being retained not only by BTEC but by SCOTVEC - the Scottish body which develops and awards almost all Scottish vocational qualifications, including its NVQ equivalent, the SVQ.

We need to consider the future of specific vocational courses, especially given the growing consensus that NVQs contain far too little theory and general education for young workers who stay in the occupational field, let alone the many who do not. A modified NVQ framework could encompass different approaches. The current one cannot.

For young people, in particular, the occupational standards which currently define NVQs in their entirety need to be one component in a vocational award, but not the only one. A major achievement of the past decade has been to create national bodies which can define and update the needs of their occupational sectors.

This is something many European countries have had for decades, but they do not make the mistake of giving these bodies total control over vocational awards. The current requirements of the workplace are not the only consideration in the European awards. Under the NVQ structure they are - and this needs to change.

Such a change would make it much easier to tackle the failure of NVQs to give young people adequate general education, especially in the fundamental - and highly “vocational” - areas of maths and English. The NCVQ position is that, for NVQs, such general skills must be defined and assessed entirely in the workplace. In theory this approach might encourage effective instruction in these areas. There is now conclusive evidence that in practice it does not.

Reform of specific vocational awards would also help promote the change needed to GNVQs, notably the delivery of core skills. GNVQs’ commitment to English “communication” and maths “application of number” recognises that these are the most important tools for occupational success. Yet the core skills approach insists that they be assessed entirely within other curriculum material, using a range of text-free “performance criteria” that no one in schools or colleges really understands.

No wonder the Office for Standards in Education lambasts core skills work as “barely satisfactory in any area or at any level”; that the Further Education Funding Council sees core skill development as “lagging behind”; and that university admissions officers are expressing dismay at the lack of maths in, for example, the key science GNVQ.

Young people recognise the importance of general skills and general education for the futures. Their political masters owe it to them to ensure that GNVQs and NVQs encourage teachers to focus on these effectively.

Alison Wolf is co-director of the International Centre for Research on Assessment and author of “GNVQs 1993-94: a national survey”, published by the Further Education Unit and the Nuffield Foundation.

Next week: Professor Alan Smithers asks whether the new NVQ criteria will bring about the reforms needed.

Edited by Ian Nash