There were burgers before there was McDonald's - just as there were qualifications before the Prime Minister grabbed the headlines by allowing the fast-food chain to put them on its menu. A-levels from McDonald's is a slick bit of marketing. It stirs up a hornet's nest and attracts attention to the bigger underlying purpose of the story. It kick-starts an awareness that there's more than one way to get qualifications in the modern world. It also creates competition in the education market-place.

Gordon Brown's announcement yesterday shatters our prejudices and preconceptions. There will also be Flybe degrees for cabin crew skills and Network Rail doctorates for engineering. I asked the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in London if this was the equivalent of the deregulation of buses. Their spokesman thought not.

But it's hardly surprising that academics are holding on to their mortar boards at this corporate invasion of the classroom and the lecture hall.

I rang the Scottish Qualifications Authority expecting to find it all of a flutter as it ran around trying to bring us up to speed and into line with England. I couldn't have been more wrong. Its spokesman could not see what all the fuss was about. He didn't turn a hair at the notion of commercial companies doling out qualifications. He said Scotland had been accrediting commercial training for years, and doing it better by establishing a universal measure.

Until now I was under the impression the SQA existed to guarantee academic standards. It turns out that while it processes about 150,000 academic qualifications a year, the bulk of its work is in vocational qualifications. It has an annual output of between half and three-quarters of a million further educational and vocational awards. It works with many companies, such as BP, on their training schemes, but rather than the company devising its own award, the SQA works with it to ensure the standard achieved is on a par with other national awards.

Bear with me because I wonder whether this is the flaw in Gordon Brown's plan for south of the border.

The SQA has devised a system that collates qualifications from across the spectrum - from plumbers to farm workers to brain surgeons - and standardises them. It allows employers to compare apples with apples; to tell at a glance what level an applicant has reached.

It seems a sound and sensible method of approach, so long as the SQA's kitemark can be trusted. So why is our Prime Minister moving toward individual commercial qualifications in England? Is it nothing more than a headline-catching gimmick?

Not according to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. It seems that while most of us judge McDonald's by the quality (or not) of its food, those who work in the sector (and in government) have a very real respect for their staff management. The company has always prided itself on the numbers of its senior management who started their McDonald's career on the shop floor. A training as floor manager with McDonald's apparently stands any individual in very good stead in the service sector, such is the company's reputation for training.

The QCA has looked at the company's in-house offering and has decided that it's of sufficiently high calibre to be able to grant awards equivalent to A-level standard. It is a pilot scheme and the QCA will have the right to ask for extras to be included to make certain a McDonald's award is on a par with City and Guilds, for example.

Not that it has many anxieties. It has confidence in the standards of McDonald's, Flybe and Network Rail.

A QCA spokesman said: "There is an understanding that between the four countries in the UK, different qualifications are recognised by employers, be they GCSE, Highers or A levels. This is just another component in the mix."

I have long been persuaded that our education system is single-strand to the point of being unintelligent. Our mainstream schools cater mainly for the academic. It would make just as much sense to cater mainly for the sporting. The net effect would be the same in that huge numbers would leave full-time education convinced of their own failure to make the grade.

We have vocational qualifications but how many of us realised that they amount to five times the number of annual academic awards? Have you ever seen a news bulletin celebrating the top scorers? Yet summer after summer Highers and A-level results hit the headlines. Meanwhile, real people are building real skills incrementally, on the job.

The QCA says billions are spent annually on staff-training schemes, with considerable waste. An employee may go through a training scheme at one company then go through a similar one at the next - because there's no certificate to chart their progress.

This initiative aims to eliminate that sort of waste. It also aims to encourage employee loyalty. Staff are more likely to stay if they can see an upward trajectory ahead.

When I first heard Mr Brown's statement yesterday I thought this was the froth, the media gimmick, for a series of sensible aspirations such as apprenticeships for one school leaver in five.

I've reconsidered. I look back on my own school career with relief that I got away with teenage fecklessness and still scraped a degree. I think back to classmates brighter than I but less fortunate in material or emotional circumstances. I think of those who could do so much with their hands or had great organisational skills but who were defeated by written academic examinations.

I don't doubt many found their way to success. But they will have needed dedicated perseverance and considerable luck to do so. This initiative could really allow easily accessible lifelong learning. If you think about it, what could be more rational than formally acknowledging that people learn on the job? They reach A-level and degree level and doctorate level.

Another advantage of this initiative is its potential to raise the game of every company to provide good training. Gordon Brown should be congratulated on two counts: for opening up an educational revolution to England's workforce and for raising overnight the perception of a job at McDonald's from the pits to a prize.

Memo to Alex Salmond: are you sure there's nothing Scotland can learn from this?