This article attempts to analyse the policy formulation in respect of the two-year YTS, highlighting the exclusivity of the process despite an apparent high profile pluralist approach. The alleged politicisation of the Manpower Services Commission appeared to generate this policy myopia and at the same time enabled a large degree of central government control of education, particularly the LEA Further Education sector, whose work has shifted as a result from a broad-based vocational education to a model based upon a far ‘harder’ concept of training.