1996 marks the 10th anniversary of the National Council for Vocational Qualifications, the body responsible for a national framework of competency-based education and training in the United Kingdom. Concurrently, the qualifications are being highlighted as they are developed at professional levels 4 and 5.The anniversary was preceded by a plethora of reports. Beaumont flagged up issues of validity, reliability and quality control in relation to the organisational structure of the framework. The Institute of Employment Studies noted that there had only been a marginal increase in the number of employers implementing the qualifications and the Higher Education Quality Council began the process of persuading the higher education sector by noting the positive contributions that competency-based assessment processes could make. However, there remain very real issues to debate. Whether knowledge and understanding can be ‘inferred’ from performance. Whether the qualifications are suitable for the complexities of professional performance. Above all, whether policy-making over the last decade has been thinking along the right lines. This paper explores those issues. © 1996 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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