Philip Hensher: Don't let McDonald's dish out burger bar A-levels

Way back in the mists of time, I wrote a column for this newspaper about the elevation of vocational training to the dignity of a liberal education. It was sparked off by the discovery that the University of Abertay, Dundee, was mounting an entire degree in Golf Tourism. Amused by this, I wondered what would happen if a product of this course decided at the end that he didn't after all want to work in the golfing industry.

Well, not to worry, I concluded; a degree of this nature would certainly prepare anyone for a career in a number of industries, including, for instance, a career stuffing baps in a sandwich shop. And if not, I concluded, "by then, the University of Abertay Dundee will surely be offering a three-year Bachelor of Arts degree in the subject."

I only quote myself to show that, as Juvenal says, difficile est saturam non scribere – it is difficult not to write satire when events so determinedly overtake the most lurid and preposterous fantasy. Commercial firms, including McDonald's, are to be given the right to award public vocational certificates in line with national qualifications. Their training programme is to be given the power to award vocational certificates at levels one, two and three; level three is the equivalent of an A-level, and in theory qualifies somebody to enter university.

It's important not to be snobbish about these training programmes, or not to recognise that, for the purposes of the firms themselves, they are often well-designed and carefully structured, aiming to produce useful and efficient workers. The focus has fallen on McDonald's, but there are other firms being given this right, such as Network Rail and FlyBe, which don't look quite so amusing in headlines. The inventor of the McJob being given the right to hand out a McA-level is more obviously funny, and obviously wrong-headed.

These training programmes, however, represent a sort of career development programme which a responsible large firm will want to ensure has some kind of solidity to it. It represents a sort of education, clearly, which is going to be much more useful and suitable for someone who wants to rise within a company over years than staying in public educational institutions and doing pointless A-levels and expensive degrees.

One can certainly see the innate use and dignity of a commercial training programme. Where resistance rises up is in the idea that these things are, in any way, or could ever be, equivalent to an independent liberal education. However excellent McDonald's training programmes are, they are always rightly going to be based on an acceptance of the firm's ethos, and an assumption of values which exist outside any kind of critical framework.

A trainee who argued that McDonald's, NetworkRail or FlyBe were corrupt capitalist organisations which ought to be bombed by anarchists is, obviously, not going to get through their training programme. But there is no such limit in a liberal education, and the question "Why ..." in classrooms and lecture rooms never stops being asked. A university which contained nobody intellectually dedicated to its overthrow would be a useless sort of place.

A commercial vocational qualification has no use for sceptical questioning. In practical terms, it seems wildly overambitious to try to establish the levels of qualification reached by the training programmes of different commercial corporations. I can't imagine the armies of publicly-funded inspectors required, even if their more modest task was to establish whether NetworkRail's trainees reached a level of competence comparable to Marks & Spencer's.

If their challenge is to discover at what point McDonald's managers have reached the level of competence comparable to an A-level in mathematics, the answer is simple and brutal. It can't be done. Not because one is a higher or more useful qualification than the other, but because they are completely different things. To try to put them into the same box diminishes the sense of a liberal, critical education.

Vocational training has its own dignity and use. But the incentives on a firm to provide that are strong enough already. No public measurement of their different efficacy will add anything to what they already achieve. Within the commercial sector, the translatable value of a good training programme is already recognised by any half-competent HR department. There just isn't a value comparable to an A-level which can be recognised, however, by a university without attacking, at a fundamental level, the idea of what may be said, thought and proposed within an educational institution.

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