The tricky thing about NQFs
National Qualifications Frameworks (NQFs) are a very common type of VET reform. This post very briefly discusses some of the evidence—or lack thereof—for their hoped-for benefits and a few reasons they might help, or fail to do so.
By Katie Caves
I’m in the middle of a literature review on VET reforms right now, so I can’t think about anything else. One thing that comes up a lot in this literature and in our CEMETS cases is National Qualifications Frameworks, or NQFs. For the review, we’re taking any kind of VET reform we can get our hands on, and a lot of them happen to be NQFs.
An NQF is supposed to be both a road map and a policy document, and in the best-case scenario it would enable communication between education and the labor market while simultaneously ensuring permeability and transparency. This type of reform has been very popular in the last few decades, ranging from the super-national European Qualifications Framework (EQF) to individual NQFs in hundreds of countries. According to the ILO, “implementation of NQFs has been widely supported by international organizations and is often linked to aid money and even loans” (Allais, 2010; piii).
However, the same report summarizes the problem with NQF reforms:
“Publications currently available about qualifications frameworks include suggestions about what qualifications frameworks are supposed to achieve, but often give little information about the problems which have occurred with their implementation, or evidence of actual measured achievements. In other words, countries are investing considerable resources in a policy mechanism which is largely untested and under-researched” (ibid, p1, emphasis theirs).
Essentially, NQFs are very common and have been implemented in a lot of places at great cost, but it isn’t clear if they are effective. In Allais’ (2010) report, she finds that NQFs are mixed at best. The strongest evidence of success is for articulation among education programs—part of permeability—but even there the positive evidence comes along with evidence that NQFs reduced articulation in other countries. There is no evidence that NQFs can improve education-employment communication either, with no signs of increased employer recognition or matching labor supply to demand.
The problem turns out to be many problems—there are challenges in every stage from NQF development to implementation and updating. An NQF is best when it is part of a much broader set of changes to ensure every program it envisions is fully functional. It needs to be designed by a true partnership of public and private actors. According to the European Training Foundation, most countries have NQFs “but these mainly exist only on paper or are only partially implemented” (ETF, 2017; p5). NQF implementation is a “far more ambitions and radical project than most policy-makers have realized” (Kingkombe, 2011; p51), and all without a guaranteed track record of impact.
There are situations when NQFs are a useful part of a high-functioning VET system. In fact, nearly all of the countries usually cited as examples of strong VET systems do have an NQF. However, so do nearly all of the other countries in the world. The idea is a good one—a clear map of every program, pathway, and route through education and training to better employment—but it might be that the system needs to exist for a map to be helpful. As stated by Kingkombe (2011, p.51), “In some ways, qualifications frameworks are best seen as utopias, and like all utopias, they are more attractive in theory than in reality.”