Why are businesses so stuffy about NVQs? The principle - that you apportion qualifications on the basis of a portfolio of work - is, after all, perfectly good enough for our universities, which have been giving out honorary degrees on essentially the same basis for years.
The latest list of higher education NVQ recipients to be announced by Her Majesty’s University of Cambridge includes novelist Margaret Drabble.
Others with university NVQs include motoring journalist Jeremy Clarkson and Noddy Holder, of Slade. Not to mention that stalwart of the pensions industry, Robert Maxwell.