The Assessment and Accreditation of Lecturers in Post‐compulsory Education: a critique of the use of competence‐based approaches

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses upon the proposed National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) accreditation of further education (FE) lecturers in England. It surveys the history of the development of competence‐based assessment, and suggest that its positivist, behaviourist origins render it inappropriate for accessing the higher order domains of beliefs, attitudes and values. Teaching, it is argued, is a sophisticated and complex occupation, which will elude technicistic mechanisms of assessment and accreditation; parallels with NVQ accreditation of management are drawn. It is concluded that the current attempt to promote a lead body for further education, based upon the NVQ model of occupational mapping, embodies all the disadvantages of criterion‐referenced assessment, with little or no benefit for lecturers themselves. The paper suggests that in order to capture the range and complexity of teaching, it will be necessary to adopt an alternative, holistic approach, which constructs the lecturer as a reflective practitioner; this will help to highlight the differentiation of the roles and tasks which are carried out by FE lecturers.