Wastebasket case

Following the decision to abruptly halt the implementation of Sir Ron Dearing's 1996 review of qualifications for 16-19-year-olds, ministers at the Department for Education and Employment have been quick to stress that work has not been abandoned.

But the message from the battered civil servants who had been battling to implement the changes to the tightest of timetables is rather different. Michael Richardson, director for qualifications at the DFEE, had been facing great hostility from schools and colleges. "I was crestfallen when stories reached me that the Dearing documents I'd been sending out - like much else that comes from the DFEE - went straight into the wastebasket at most institutions," he told a conference of college heads this week. "But those who treated these documents with such contempt, those who ignored all my previous correspondence," he confessed, "turned out to be right." What hope for Dearing's review of higher education?