From NVQs to ‘Policy Scholarship’: evolving a research agenda for post‐compulsory professional development

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Abstract
Political insistence on implementing higher level National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) and General Vocational Qualifications (GNVQs) currently dominates the ideological high ground for professional development for the post‐compulsory sector. There is a widespread and mistaken belief that GNVQs might redress NVQs’ shortcomings by adding ‘underpinning knowledge’ and offering a broader view of a vocational area. There is evidence that NVQs are adapting to criticism; at higher levels, they appear to be appropriating many features that underpin existing approaches to professional development. This article argues that this apparent reforming of NVQs obscures how the underlying values and educational purposes of professional learning are being completely redefined as both NVQs and GNVQs strengthen their powerful ideological and technical hold over the education and training system. Externally defined and restrictive mechanisms for learning and assessment will eventually dominate teachers’ and learners’ views about the content, scope and purposes of education and training. Yet in posing alternatives, there are important flaws in existing models which weaken our critiques of competence‐based qualifications. In responses to these difficulties, there is a need to combine a rich body of recent research into professional development, pedagogic practice and education policy making, with a concerted debate about ideology and educational values. This would resist the current tendency for research and critique to focus on the technicalities of implementing NVQs and GNVQs. It would also effect a resurrection in research of what Grace (1994) has called ‘policy scholarship’ as part of an attempt to evolve a better system for continuing professional development in the post‐16 sector than the one we already have, or the impoverished competence‐based version currently on offer.

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