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1996 marks the 10th anniversary of the National Council for Vocational Qualifications, the body responsible for a national framework of competency-based education and training in the United Kingdom. Concurrently, the qualifications are being highlighted as they are developed at professional levels 4 and 5.The anniversary was preceded by a plethora of reports. Beaumont flagged up issues of validity, reliability and quality control in relation to the organisational structure of the framework. The Institute of Employment Studies noted that there had only been a marginal increase in the number of employers implementing the qualifications and the Higher Education Quality Council began the process of persuading the higher education sector by noting the positive contributions that competency-based assessment processes could make.However, there remain very real issues to debate. Whether knowledge and understanding can be 'inferred' from performance. Whether the qualifications are suitable for the complexities of professional performance. Above all, whether policy-making over the last decade has been thinking along the right lines. This paper explores those issues. This year, 1996, marks the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the National Council for Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ). A competency-based, outcome-measured, national infrastructure, National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs)-generated under the auspices of the Council-represent a centralised policy-making process, which has had profound effects on educational providers. The uptake of these qualifications fell below target, giving rise to a relaunch in March, 1995. A report commissioned by the Department for Education and Employment, and carried out by the Institute of Employment Studies (IES, 1995), found that, although awareness of NVQs had risen almost to saturation point amongst employers, there had not been an equivalent degree of interest in implementing the qualifications. Using evidence from, amongst a range of contributors, 758 employers in England and Wales, the report showed that, even in the organisations which were using NVQs, only a small proportion of the workforce was involved. On average, it was thought that something fewer than one tenth of employees were

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