NN46, September 2011
Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark
Mobility and Transparency: Some Cautionary Thoughts on Qualifications Frameworks
By Michael Young, Institute of Education, University of London
Email: m.young@ioe.ac.uk
Keywords: unintended consequences; transparency; portability; linearity; coherence
Summary: This article examines the 'dark side' of a current global fashion, National Qualifications Frameworks. It argues that in giving priority to an exaggerated belief in the merits of flexibility they could actually lead to new inequalities- denying the disadvantaged access to the ‘powerful knowledge’ they need.
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It is almost a sociological truism to state that educational policies - indeed any policies, have unintended as well as intended consequences. However, like many truisms, it is often forgotten. Furthermore, the latter can sometimes be more significant than the former. The recent tendency to use qualifications as drivers of educational reform is no exception.
I am going to explore the unintended consequences of the recent spread of national and regional qualification frameworks –in Europe and more widely. My aim is not just to criticise recent policy on qualifications, but to widen the debate about our educational priorities.
Over 100 national Qualification Frameworks are being implemented around the world, supported by all the major international agencies (OECD, World Bank, UNESCO, Asian Development Bank); so this is no marginal phenomenon. Furthermore, this global process continues despite remarkably little conclusive empirical evidence from those countries where they already exist.
This lack of evidence for many of the claims made for NQFs was supported by the recent ILO Project on implementing NQFs (ILO 2011). It is as if certain policies - NQFs are an example, but I would also include CBT (Competence–based Training) and curricula based on learning outcomes OBE), are beyond the need for evidence - despite the fashionable slogan calling for evidence-based policies.
Two of the main goals of qualification frameworks are transparency and portability of qualifications and the mobility of learners whether as students or workers. Before raising some questions about these claims, let me first put the positive case for NQFs
Transparency
It is difficult to disagree with the idea that those thinking of studying for a qualification or hoping to get their existing skills and knowledge assessed for a qualification need to know what they can expect to know and be able to do when they are qualified. Equally, other key users of qualifications, such as employers recruiting new workers or admission tutors recruiting new students, also need to know what a qualified person knows and can do. That is transparency. More transparent qualifications should be more highly regarded and encourage more people to become qualified.
Portability
Traditional qualifications, especially vocational qualifications, have been much criticised as cul de sacs - they often led nowhere beyond themselves and were un-related to each other. Three aspects of this lack of portability of traditional qualifications can be listed.
1. Many vocational qualifications (VQs) provided no route to degree level studies. The only alternative for those with VQs who wanted to go to university was to begin again by studying for examinations designed for those at school.
2. Insurmountable barriers existed between general (or academic) and vocational qualifications. There was virtually no ‘portability’ between the two.
3. Qualifications were invariably only recognised within countries. This minimised the opportunity for learners, whether students or workers, to move between countries when new job opportunities arose.
4. Most VQs were tightly ‘packaged’ in relation to the occupation that they were designed for. For the learner wanting to change course or occupation, the only alternative was to begin again. No transfer between qualifications of what a learner knew or could do was possible.
All these constraints were identified by policy makers from the mid 1980s as ‘barriers’ which a single qualification framework (QF) would remove. A Qualification framework lays down criteria for gaining a qualification and moving from one level to another. Learners accumulate units or modules - unimpeded by the old barriers whether national or occupational, or those related to specialist fields of knowledge.
There are two kinds of problems with this Qualification Framework model that I want to refer to. One is that it has too narrow and negative view of the boundaries in the old system – boundaries can be but are not necessarily arbitrary or just barriers preserving an occupation’s interests. The second problem with the model is whether it is right to give so much emphasis to portability and transparency.
Transparency and portability re-visited
Transparency and Portability can be understood as slogans taken from the field of free-market economics. If the labels on goods are visible and they are priced with a common unit of exchange, the market in those goods will work best. A fine model, maybe for a supermarket (although not if you are a small shop keeper)- but what if the ‘goods’ are not eggs but evidence that someone has mastered difficult ideas and complex tasks? Is it even possible to spell out what someone should know at the end of a course in a way that is comprehensible to a beginning learner. Surely, specialist knowledge and skills are intrinsically not ‘transparent’ to beginning learners. What you will know on completing a course cannot be explained to any unqualified person, except in the most general terms, by giving them a list of learning outcomes. Attempts to do so always end in trivialising what is to be learned. The basis of the relationship between learners and what they want to know or be able to do at the end of a course is not that of a buyer and seller. It is TRUST- in the teacher and the school or college. An over-emphasis on transparency undermines trust. It is just the same in any profession- we want go get well, we don’t want to know the steps the surgeon will take-we take on trust that she/he will take the right steps. By attempting to make intrinsically difficult ideas transparent the role of qualifications as a proxy based on trust is put into question.
A similar kind of argument can also be made about portability. There is a degree of arbitrariness in the boundaries between qualifications. However specialisation of work and learning has been the main driver of progress since industrialisation began, and defining boundaries have been part of that process. Boundaries need to be looked at as opportunities as well as barriers.
Qualification Frameworks and social change
The goals of portability and mobility pre-suppose a model of social change I refer to as de-differentiation- that occupations and specialist skills and knowledge are becoming more alike. To put it starkly, these goals assume that the differentiation of occupations, knowledge, regions and nations that has been a feature of the last 150 years or more of industrialisation is going in reverse and that differences are increasingly part of the past. Occupations are replaced by the same jobs which may arise anywhere in any country and any continent. A qualification framework appears to embody this model of social change.
There are 3 questions worth raising about this picture of social change that I shall mention.
(i) Is the de-differentiation model of social change consistent with arguments for the specialist knowledge that will underpin any future knowledge economy?
(ii) Who are these mobile workers so often referred to? I suspect they are largely of two kinds- the elite employees of multi-nationals who can and do disregard qualification frameworks and the unemployed from disadvantaged communities searching for the growing number of low skilled jobs that knowledge economies generate. They too will have little use for qualifications.
(iii) What might be lost as qualifications are increasingly broken up into ‘transparent’ ‘bite sized ‘chunks to maximise portability, and learners are encouraged to construct their own pathways?
My answer to the last question is sequence- or the necessary linearity and coherence of learning. We know enough about the conditions under which people acquire difficult specialist knowledge. It needs to be sequenced in ways that ensure that learners do not miss key concepts. Pathways to powerful knowledge must be linear, and cannot rely on the inevitably un-informed choices of learners. If access to specialist knowledge is important, its logic points in a very different direction to the logics of transparency and portability.
The logic of my argument is that portable, transparent choice–based frameworks will inevitably lead to new inequalities. The high achievers will largely disregard them and the disadvantaged will make choices that take them nowhere.
This is not a call to abandon national or regional frameworks; far from it. Within 20 years virtually all countries will have NQFs and there will be a growing number of regional frameworks. It is to recognise that their role is guides to users not prescriptions. The big question facing most countries is how to create knowledge-based and employment–generating growth. This can only be the result of widening opportunities for learners to acquire specialist knowledge and improving the specialist qualifications of teachers and trainers.
References
Allais. S (2010) The implementation and impact of National Qualifications Frameworks: Report of a study in 16 countries, Geneva, International Labour Office.
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Cite article as: Young, M., (2011) ‘Mobility and Transparency: Some Cautionary Thoughts on Qualifications Frameworks’, in NORRAG NEWS, Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark, No.46, September 2011, pp. 84-87, available: http://www.norrag.org
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