ABSTRACT
In the 1980s the importance of competition and the market was the hallmark of many public policy initiatives. In the field of education academics found that educational qualifications were to face a new market entrant: the National Vocational Qualification (NVQ). This qualification did not require a learning process - it was based on industry-led notions of competence, it shunned the traditional pedagogic methods of educational institutions. According to NCVQ, candidates could be, indeed should be, assessed in the workplace by supervisors and managers with the required and certified competence in workplace assessment. So with the launch of NVQs a rival system of qualifications had been set up which many academics, and others, felt was implicitly an attack on the value of existing academic qualifications. But not every initiative was of this kind, and one at least was in keeping with the mood of the 1990s. The Enterprise in Higher Education (EHE) initiative matches well the 1990s
mood for partnership and the renewed appreciation of targeting for support and innovation those organisations and institutions that are established and have shown their durability. Equally, we can contrast the way in which NVQs put the emphasis on developing individuals to fit the functional requirements of occupations and the way in which the EHE initiative had a more humanistic concern with developing skilled and purposeful individuals. However, this is not an argument for the preference of the EHE initiative over NVQs; indeed there is a strong need to relate the development of functional competences and personal skills - each depends on the other. These issues are explored from within the perspective of higher education and with reference to the concerns and habits that filter higher education's responses to the EHE initiative.
