When the lights finally dim, the room is filled with a chorus of whoops and whistles, followed by a burst of laughter, as the tutor, Mitch Goodwin, uses his lighter to squint at the controls on his laptop computer. At length, the big screen flickers into life and the first of three short films opens with the image of one of the boys at the front thundering down a staircase to the pounding intro of The Spencer Davis Group's 1966 hit "Keep on Running". We are witnessing the d?uement of one of nine summer schools being run this year by the University of the First Age, a government-subsidised charity set up to offer structured extracurricular activities to secondary school children. It's mid-afternoon on a broiling Friday and 10 excitable teenagers are perched on benches in a mercifully air-conditioned film theatre, waiting for a screening to start. Near the back of the auditorium, a group of girls is singing a cappella. "There is a view that children do not learn their attitudes until they are about five," she says. "But people in the early years know that children at a very early age - at the age of three - are categorising people. I am not talking about white children; I am talking about all children.".

Toddlers from different ethnic backgrounds should be encouraged to "play together from day one" to stop prejudice developing in these formative years, he recently suggested. Surely it is a nonsense to try to achieve this through two separate qualifications running side by side, and much more sense to include them under the overarching umbrella of just one qualification?. This could also help them "unlearn any racist attitudes and behaviour they may already have learned," he said Jane Lane, an early years equality adviser, agrees. Even when children are still in nappies, they may be racist, according to Lord Ouseley, the former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. It is not too late to go back on that decision and move towards the Tomlinson diploma instead. The Government itself said it would review the decision in 2008.Those who defend the specialised diplomas (there will eventuallybe 14 of them by 2013) do so in a language that emphasises their desire to have parity of esteem between academic and vocational qualifications. Indeed, they want to remove the divide so that individual qualifications can contain an element of both academic and vocational study.

In truth, it is unlikely that they ever will unless they are united under the same umbrella as A-levels and GCSEs.Sir Mike Tomlinson, the former chief schools inspector, in his inquiry into schooling for 14- to 19-year-olds, recommended scrapping the GCSE and A-level system and replacing it with an overarching diploma covering both academic and vocational qualifications. As we know, this was vetoed by Tony Blair before the 2005 general election because he was worried he would be portrayed as the Prime Minister who got rid of the "gold standard" of education. Students can elect to study them at level one, pre-GCSE standard; or level two, the equivalent of GCSE; or level three, the equivalent of A-level. The diplomas have been devised in consultation with industry to ensure they are recognised by employers when they come on to the market - for that, the Government deserves praise. However, to many in education, they still seem unlikely to be treated with the same respect as the more traditional academic qualifications. These specifications show that the diplomas - in construction and the built environment; IT; engineering; health and social care; and creative and media writing - will include a mixture of A-level-style academic content and a more vocational element. At the weekend, ministers published the first details of what students could be expected to study if they opt to take up any of the five diplomas that will be on offer from September 2008. There is still a good deal of scepticism in the profession over the Government's plans for a new specialised vocational diploma to run alongside A-levels.