faith in FE colleges ability to appreciate employers’ needs.
Employing a methodology known as ‘functional analysis’, the consultants introduced a new
principle into VET qualifications, namely the specification of competence by its ‘outcomes
rather than by the means by which the outcomes are achieved’ (Miller, cited in Mansfield &
Mitchell 1996, p. 103). This emphasis on workplace competence, that is, what an ‘employee
was expected to do, not what they needed to know’ (Mansfield & Mitchell 1996, p. 93) had a
number of consequences. First, it replaced the concept of skill formation, that is, vocational
pedagogy with the notion that learning could be equated with the accumulation of units of
competence (Barnett 2006). Second, it resulted in knowledge only being deemed to be
relevant in vocational qualifications insofar as it ‘underpinned performance’ (Young, 2006).
Third, asserted that the assessment was an emancipatory process because it was based on a
detached observation of workplace performance: ‘based on assessments of the outcomes of
learning’, NVQs can be achieved ‘independently of any particular mode, duration or location
of learning’ (NCVQ and ED cited in Burke, 1995, p. 63).
In light of the conventional wisdom of the time that employability in future depended on the
acquisition of more flexible and less occupationally-specific skill sets (Reich, 1990), the
consultants made a two-fold argument about the relevance and transferability of NVQs. First,
that it was possible to identify common skills in different work areas, those skills could be
included within common functional NVQ units, and that these units were applicable in
different sectors. Second, that people mainly learn by copying or imitating accepted patterns
of workplace performance. Taken in combination, these assumptions about human behaviour
led the consultants to conclude that:
people would be able to transfer from occupation to occupation through the achievement of common
units and elements of competence, which would offer coherence in the national system of NVQs
(Mansfield & Mitchell, 1996, p. 237).
These assumptions became the cornerstone for the revitalization of apprenticeship in the form
of the Modern Apprenticeship (MA) and continue to have a significant influence on the
design of the AAP.
The MA was launched in 1994 as a new market-led and outcomes-based scheme to provide
employers with skilled intermediary level workers (Gospel, 1998; Steedman et al, 1998). The
MA was characterized from the outset, however, by a number of tensions. One tension was
between the behavioural assumptions about learning that underpinned NVQs and the
cognitive assumptions which underpinned ideas about the value of core (now key) skills such