A Staff Development Forum for the post-16 sector has recently been established. It will examine the need for a more coherent approach to staff training and professional development, including the introduction of ‘national standards’ in the form of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs). This paper argues that there is, indeed, an urgent need to consider the case for some form of consensus about what constitutes best practice in teaching. But a proper consideration must begin from a conceptualisation of teaching as professional practice. Three typical characteristics of professional practice are examined for their relevance to teaching: ethical values, autonomous pragmatism and the pursuit of expertise, together with the question of whether current NVQs can provide an account of these characteristics. The conclusion drawn is that methodological inadequacies of a conceptual, psychological and epistemological nature prevent them from doing so, and that these inadequacies derive from the role of competence-based qualifications in New Right social and educational policy. The potential effect of devising qualifications using the current competence-based approach is a reconceptualisation of teaching and learning as technical procedures, and of teachers as technicians. Unless resisted, this will achieve the ideological intention of subordinating the practice of teachers to direct political and managerial control, thus rendering teachers and learners less independent and autonomous, more impotent. © 1996 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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