Minimalist reductionism in the English VET curriculum: the case of competence-based education and training

The story of how competence-based education and training (CBET) was introduced into vocational education and training (VET) in England through the establishment of the former National Council for Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ) in 1986 has been told by many commentators in the field (Burke, 1995; Bates, 1998) including myself (Hyland,1994). The foundations for a major overhaul of VET were established with the publication of A New Training Initiative by the then Department of Employment, though this itself can be viewed as a continuation of earlier training programmes designed to deal with massive youth unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s. From the very start, accountability in terms of 'outputs...the standards that need to be achieved at the end of the learning programme' (Jessup, 1990, p.18) was predominant. There was an insistence that at the heart of the initiative lie standards of a new kind, and it was the pursuit of such standards - based on competence outputs constructed through the functional analysis methodology of CBET - which was to provide the driving force for the development of national vocational qualifications (NVQs).