ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some of the implications of a recent trend for governments (in the UK and elsewhere) to use qualifications as a main driver of educational reform,1 especially but not only in the field of vocational education and training. The chapter is not directly concerned with the issue of knowledge that has been a recurring theme in this book. However, the emergence of a new approach to qualifications (I refer to it in the chapter as the outcomes-based approach) raises some of the epistemological issues with which this book is concerned in a peculiarly acute way. I am not suggesting that qualifications cannot provide some indication of what a person knows and can do; nor do I argue that they have no role in educational reform. Qualifications are an element of social reality of the education systems of all societies; they do, to an extent, motivate learners, they are used by employers to screen applicants for jobs and increasingly, as this chapter argues, they are used by governments as part of how they control educational institutions. However, what I question is that qualifications expressed as outcomes or standards can provide an adequate basis for teachers to develop the curriculum. This can only lead, as is argued in greater detail in Chapter 9, to a collapse of standards (I use the term here in the older sense of raising (or lowering) standards) as opposed to the relatively new idea of writing or setting standards as precise statements of outcomes).
