My Lords, this amendment seems such a good thing, but I really doubt whether all the administration it involves is actually necessary or desirable. Governments are not always very keen on looking at what happened in the past, whether it succeeded and the reasons why not if it did not. Of course, that is never a reason not to try again, but it does seem pointless to spend time and money re-enacting things for which the criteria have not changed. This is one of the reasons I deplore the
crash introduction of T-levels with no regard for other vocational initiatives—I am thinking of diplomas in particular— that were introduced unsuccessfully without consideration of past mistakes. I am afraid I do have quite a long memory of such things.
In the olden days of polytechnics, all accreditation was carried out by CNAA, the Council for National Academic Awards. In theory it should have been a very simple matter for students to transfer credits between organisations, as obviously there was a level playing field for credits. In practice, very few students ever transferred from one institution to another, and the mechanisms for doing so were by no means straightforward.
In 1992, polytechnics disappeared and were reincarnated as universities. For some this was not a great advantage: Oxford and Hatfield polytechnics, for instance, had tremendous names and becoming universities was certainly not initially a help to their well-earned reputations.
I was working for City & Guilds in the early days of national vocational qualifications in the 1980s. The Government gave permission for a large number of awarding organisations—some with pretty dubious credentials—to award NVQs. All awarding organisations had to agree to recognise any units awarded by any awarding organisation. City & Guilds, as the premier vocational awarding organisation, was not delighted by this, but conformed by spending a great deal of time and money ensuring that its highly protected accreditation mechanisms could accommodate units from another organisation. In practice, this arduous work proved largely unnecessary. There were few, if any, requests to transfer between awarding bodies.
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My work at City & Guilds involved forming partnerships with universities and professional bodies for this very purpose: to try to recognise how vocational qualifications might be used as credits to transfer to university programmes or for professional memberships. We had some very successful partnerships, but it was by no means universal and they each had to be done individually because no one organisation would accept a credit that had been agreed by another organisation: you had to work with them one at a time.
Some education providers will always be happy to accept credits from another organisation where they are assured that these credits meet their own criteria, but we really do not need this in legislation. It must be left to each provider to decide whether it will accept the standards and credits of another body. I readily acknowledge that credit transfer could be useful and positive but I have no wish to see education providers compelled to accept credits from other bodies where they are inappropriate, dubious or extremely difficult to accommodate administratively—which is another aspect of this. Let us be happy for those organisations which do accept the standards and credits of others, but please do not put credit transfer into legislation.