“It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that it’s part of a strategy to force colleges down a vocational route.”At Labour’s conference in Brighton, the AoC organised a fringe debate on whether vocational qualifications are a likely stepping-stone to higher education. “The trouble is that they can afford to say it because there’s absolutely no chance they will be in government for the next 10 years,” he adds. “That’s a shame for FE.”Pendle is more concerned by Labour’s rejection of the key recommendation made by Tomlinson and his suggestion that successful schools must be encouraged to open new sixth forms. “At the last election, they tried to make their policies more water-tight than in previous years.”According to Peter Pendle, the chief executive of the Association of College Management, Liberal Democrat statements on funding are music to the ears of colleges. “We have to find the money elsewhere in the budget,” he says.Chris Walden, the parliamentary officer at the Association of Colleges (AoC), says that, while Labour’s 2001 pledge to close the gap has started to appear “half-hearted”, the Liberal Democrats have now properly costed their spending commitments. A government statement on what ministers describe as “technical anomalies” is expected in a few months’ time.Edward Davey, the Liberal Democrat education and skills spokesman, believes the funding gap could be closed within five years without taking money from schools.

They also remain the only major party committed to a 14-19 diploma, in line with the Tomlinson review.
The Conservatives, having promised to abolish the Learning and Skills Council, have had the satisfaction of watching Labour slowly dismantling the bureaucratic post-16 funding system that was created four years ago.Since the election, a Learning and Skills Development Agency report has revealed that schools receive about 13 per cent more than FE colleges for teaching 16-19-year-olds. Five months after the general election, each of the main political parties appears to be sticking with the policies voters were offered in May. The Liberal Democrats reinforced their pledge to close the funding gap between colleges and school sixth-forms, although few people expect to be around to see them do it. While it would be stretching the truth to suggest that further education dominated this year’s party conferences, colleges have not been entirely forgotten by politicians. But he is living proof that you can mix and match qualifications to get into a leading university – from school-leaver at 16, to work-based learning, and finally to world-class graduate with distinction.That’s not a bad advertisement for any university.The writer is the chief executive of the Association of Colleges. The only secure economic future for Britain lies, he said, in “knowledge, skills, intelligence, the talents Britain has in abundance if only we set them free”.If that is to happen, then surely the onus is on the Government to keep its word on qualifications reform, to offer “high-quality, high-status vocational routes of learning that offer young people real choice and opportunity”.David Eaves had to put his qualifications together through his own endeavours in order to get to Cambridge. There are also huge issues about information, advice and guidance for young people, ensuring that the routes they are offered are not based on the presumption that academic equals able, vocational equals less able.In his speech to the Labour Party faithful in Brighton, Tony Blair warned us not to resist the force of globalisation, but to prepare for it.

We still face entrenched attitudes – the assumption that if you are studying for vocational qualifications, somehow you are less able. Professor Schwartz’s steering group also found that some higher education institutions in effect exclude learners with vocational and access qualifications.Universities must move with the times, but it is not as simple as converting a few admissions tutors in the hallowed halls. Despite growth in the number of students entering higher education with vocational qualifications, they feel disadvantaged, for several reasons, including a lack of confidence in the credibility of their qualification, partly due to difficulty in relating it to university entrance requirements. At the Labour Party conference, he contributed to an Association of Colleges debate, supporting the motion: “Should vocational qualifications take you to an ?te university?”He says that for certain subjects with a vocational element, there is no reason why a suitable vocational qualification should not be acceptable, allied if necessary with suitable academic qualifications.University admissions processes should seek to minimise barriers irrelevant to satisfying admissions requirements – including an applicant’s type of qualifications – according to recommendations on fair admissions by Professor Steven Schwartz, vice-chancellor of Brunel University. It has said it wants to encourage more applicants via the vocational route.Cambridge’s director of admissions, Dr Geoff Parkes, has allied himself to the cause. Since he graduated, the university has rightly celebrated his success by profiling him in its prospectus. He left comprehensive school at 16, trained as an apprentice engineer at a local firm and took an HNC, and took maths A-level by distance learning in his spare time.Cambridge accepted him, although he did not have the entry requirement of three A grades at A-level.

Last year, he graduated from the University of Cambridge with a distinction in engineering. Achievement aside, his case is notable because it represents a shift in attitude towards vocational qualifications by one of our top universities.David, from Blackpool, didn’t take the traditional A-level route. It’s precisely what is needed to describe, for example, the way that Darcy’s swim, as performed by Colin Firth, has become part of Pride and Prejudice in our heads.The writer’s ‘From Alien to the Matrix’ is published by IB Tauris. Remember Laura Spence? Five years ago, a pupil at a state school, she found herself at the centre of a national row about the ?te universities’ admissions policies. Despite being predicted for straight A A-levels, she was refused a place to read medicine at Magdalen College, Oxford. She went on to win a scholarship to study biochemistry at Harvard, leaving in her wake a continuing debate about fair admissions to higher education.
Today, I can reveal another cause c?bre, although he’s unlikely to make headlines in the way Laura Spence did His name is David Eaves.

One of these terms, “fanon”, refers to the shared assumptions by fans that supplement the canon of a show or of an author’s work. As far as she can without contravening those laws, Pugh gives a solid idea of the merits of some writers in the five “fandoms” she covers.The Democratic Genre is a lively book which lovingly details fan writers’ private language. Others, like Joss Whedon, Buffy’s creator, positively encourage it and occasionally make teasing allusions to it in their work. Much of the work is amateurish; a certain saving fragment is of a high standard, publishable save for the laws of copyright. Writers of “fanfic” have a gift relationship with each other in which you express your regard for stories not merely by reviews and e-mail comment, but by writing your own.Some writers dislike the idea of fan fiction (Anne Rice, for example), and it is perhaps only polite to respect their wishes. It became a way of understanding the show’s snappy dialogue, by writing my own, of bulldozing through a long-standing writer’s block, and of getting to know some interesting and accomplished work.Pugh’s determined avoidance of the sociology of fan fiction leads her to ignore one important aspect of the subculture. There is a whole world out there, in fanzines and on the net, of sequels to Jane Austen books, and of versions of Blake’s 7 in which the massacre of the cast with which the BBC ended the show’s run never happened, and of stories in which every possible sexual permutation of the minor characters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is ingeniously worked through.