Just a quick addendum to my earlier article on competency based education. Things go round and much of my experience was from providing professional development to teachers and trainers for the UK around the introduction of the competency based National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs)in the early 1990s.  At the same time the National Council for Vocational Qualifications, charged with the development of the NVQs established a development group which I was a member of and which held lengthy discussions over issues which arose in trialling and evaluation of the new qualifications. Some of the issues I talked about in the last article including the particularly contentious discussions around knowledge.

Another issue which caused much debate was that of level. In the past longer courses tended to have a higher level, but since competence based qualifications were supposed to replace the updated time serving involved in earning, this was a non-starter. Some argued that it was illogical to even try to prescribe level to a competence – either someone was competent or they were not. But political pressures meant there must be levels so the pressure then was to find any consistent way of doing it. It is some time since I last looked ta UK vocational qualifications and I do not know how the levels are presently being determined. But back in the 1990s it was essentially determined by the degree of autonomy or responsibility that someone held in a job. If they mostly followed instructions then their competence was at a low level, if they were responsible for managing others their level of competence was much higher. Of course, this led to all kinds of strange anomalies which were in the best traditions of UK pragmatism juggled with until the level of the qualification felt about right.

I will try and find some of the longer papers I wrote at the time which may still have some relevance for current debates over competency based education.