ABSTRACT
Unlike the universities the colleges have never had a qualification of their own. As we have seen in Chapter 2, they began by offering the vocational qualifications of such bodies as the Royal Society of Arts and the City and Guilds of the City of London, and the ordinary and higher national certificates and diplomas which became BTEC awards. But gradually, through initially offering a second chance at GCE O-levels and, on the back of this, A-levels, they have become more and more involved with academic qualifications. They also took the overspill from the universities in the aftermath of the Second World War and got a taste for teaching degrees which has fuelled the process that Pratt and Burgess (1974) have dubbed ‘academic drift’. The whole range of qualifications, including many certificates and diplomas particular to certain colleges and employers, are represented within further education. As Melville and Macleod report in Chapter 3, the FEFC has so far counted no less than 17,000 different awards.
