NN39, October 2007
Best Practice in Education and Training: Hype or Hope?
Lessons from Qualifications Framework Experience
By Simon McGrath, University of Nottingham
KeywordsQualifications Frameworks, Best practice
Summary
This article raises a series of questions about the motivations of governments and international agencies in adopting Qualifications Frameworks (QFs) and the likely challenges faced in developing a QF that is both effective and efficient.
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National and regional qualifications frameworks continue to exert great power over policymakers? imaginations. Hong Kong, for instance, will launch a new Qualifications Framework (QF) in January 2008. However, this policy fascination is not easily explicable by the evidence of the first nearly two decades of experience of running QFs. The purpose of this short piece, therefore, will be to raise a series of questions about the motivations of governments and international agencies in adopting QFs and the likely challenges faced in developing a QF that is both effective and efficient.
Why QFs?
Part of the problem facing actually existing QFs is the rationale behind them. QFs have too often been seen as a panacea to solve complex problems and challenges. A QF purportedly will deal with the legacy of Apartheid or British class society; reposition an Antipodean nation from an ex-dominion to a Pacific Rim nation; or more, generally, help in the creation of a globalised knowledge economy (whatever that soundbite might actually mean). Often, they are expected to address multiple goals that are in serious tension with one another. However, in these aspirations they are clearly and grossly oversold and, thus, doomed to at least partial failure, mirroring other educational grand projects down the decades. Even if a QF is presented as the solution to the apparently simpler issue of the academic-vocational divide, it is clear on reflection that this works far better as slogan than reality.
What are the key challenges facing QFs?
Beyond the issue of over-ambition, I want to look at three types of challenges faced by QFs:
Design
Implementation
Unanticipated Effects
What are the challenges of design?
Should a QF include both academic and vocational programmes? Clearly, from the point of view of ambition, a QF is only a ?real? QF when it covers both academic and vocational programmes. However, a number of countries have sought only to develop vocational qualification frameworks (VQFs), at least in the short- to medium-term. Others, South Africa being a very visible example, have struggled to make a full QF work. Finding the issue of comparability (and, hence, portability of occupational awards into the academic system) impossible to resolve in practice, South Africa has essentially abandoned a fully integrated approach in favour of loosely articulated occupational and academic/vocationally oriented sub-systems.
Should it address all levels of education and training or be sub-system based? Again, the heroic logic is clear. However, a two-fold pragmatic logic has often prevailed that has concentrated attention on the youth/further/intermediate element of the system. First, it is argued that the real "problem" is in developing an articulated and relevant system of education and training that can lead the youth into either work or further studies. Therefore, this is the point at which to concentrate scarce resources. Second, it is argued that universities are best positioned, and highly likely, to resist incorporation into a QF and so it is prudent to leave HE out, at least in the early years of QF development. Again, different actually existing QFs have varied in their positions on this and these positions have sometimes shifted over time in the direction both of more and less ambitious coverage.
There are further design questions for which there is also no QF best practice. These include:
Should a QF be understood and designed as an enabling or a regulatory framework?
Should both whole and part awards be allowed?
Should there be a set of core competencies evidenced across all programmes, and should these be tested for separately?
How generic should awards be across levels, subjects and sectors?
Moreover, there are difficult issues about sequencing reforms - including capacity development and promotional matters. Perhaps more fundamentally, there are also major challenges in promoting participation in the design of QFs. Too often, the QF process has been the preserve of experts (often international consultants), with its own arcane language rather than a site of democratic involvement by a wide range of practitioners and other stakeholders.
What are the challenges of implementation?
QFs are relatively easy to develop on paper but the capacity to deliver them is far harder to put in place. They have tended to generate a plethora of new structures, all requiring financial and human resources and bringing significant challenges of institutional development. With the proliferation of QF-related agencies has also tended to come empire building, as these agencies battle for limited resources and status. Individual institutional logics also tend to operate in semi-autonomy from each other and the system, resulting in incoherence and inconsistency of policies and practices.
The setting up of new institutions, new awards and new processes means that QFs take considerable time to be established. In South Africa, for instance, it has taken 13 years from Act of Parliament to the introduction of new awards in the further education and training colleges. They are also high cost solutions. South Africa took the decision not to charge commercial rates for the South African Qualifications Authority's services and has been dependent on EU grants ever since. How poorer countries without a significant set of formal sector employers are likely to pay for a QF without donor subvention remains unclear.
Other implementational challenges include:
the participation of small, micro and/or informal enterprises;
the continued existence of ?old? (particularly transnational) awards;
the position of private providers; and
the effective implementation of programmes of recognition of prior learning.
What are the challenges of unanticipated effects?
I have already suggested the QFs have been given unrealistic ambitions. I also want to argue that they have also resulted in a series of unanticipated negative effects.
First, although initially constructed as social democratic solutions, they have been characterised in practice by increased bureaucratisation and the rise of technocratic language.
Second, they have also had serious impacts on the progressive educational project, albeit allied with other reform trends linked to the rise of the new public management. Instead of empowering learners, they have encouraged credentialism and a decline of andragogy, with certificated outcomes crowding out self-directed learning. This has also led to an undermining of the ?university of the third age? in systems dependent largely on state subvention, as resources are increasingly targeted to the promotion of employability amongst those of working age.
Third, they have also contributed to the wider undermining of education and training professionals, through the rise of the tendencies noted in the previous two paragraphs.
What might be the characteristics of a ?Clever QF??
My scepticism about the QF experiment will be clear from what I have already written. However, in so far as QFs continue to be bought and sold as a policy solution to very real problems, there is a need to conclude with some suggestions of where good QF practice may lie.
Given the history of QFs to date, caution and modesty are both required in developing new models at the national and regional level. I would also suggest that the evidence favours an incrementalist approach to implementation over South African-style attempts at once-and-for-all implementation. Maximising participation and transparency are also notions that fit well with QF rhetoric, if not much of the reality. Equally, QFs should aspire to facilitating the participation of learners, providers and employers and should work from a basis of trust. Finally, future QFs need to take very seriously the issue of contextualisation of awards in the communities of knowledge and practice in which they will need to be located. An arc welding certificate and a PhD do not need to have the same format of certification or examination to both co-exist on a QF and serious violence may be done to both in the simplistic search for equivalence.
Further reading
Coles M. (2006) A Review of International and National Developments in the use of Qualifications Frameworks, report for ETF, Turin.
Young M. (2005) National qualifications frameworks: Their feasibility for effective implementation in developing countries Skills Working Paper No. 22, ILO, Geneva.
Journal of Education and Work (2003) Special Issue on National Qualifications Frameworks 16/3.
Journal of Vocational Education and Training (2005) Special Issue on Skills Development in South Africa 57/4.
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