This paper examines curriculum and assessment policy in Australian vocational education and training. Throughout the 1990s curriculum and assessment policy in Australia has been enacted through demand-side market oriented policies. Training policy has focused on the development of a competitive national economy through centralist policies for competency-based training, which emphasize the development of standard outcomes of training to meet industry needs and requirements. Competency-based training is conceptualized into dichotomies that reflect a rational orientation based on an underlying positivistic approach in which facts and values, means and ends are separated as rational, managerial mechanisms of control. An alternative coherentist view of pragmatic problem-solving approaches to curriculum and assessment policy is advocated. In this framework the tentative and evolutionary nature of theory are acknowledged. Rather than a concern for universal solutions, pragmatic evolutionary approaches are concerned to develop an enduring capacity in the system to recognize and deal with shared problems, issues and dilemmas.
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