UK policy makers continue to focus on increasing skills as a means to economic andsocial prosperity and social mobility. Qualifications – the certificates and diplomasawarded following education, training or learning – stand as a proxy for skill andmany policies aim to raise levels of qualifications held. Policy makers have focusedmuch attention on vocational qualifications and history is replete with efforts toreform the vocational education and training (VET) system. Many studies haveidentified both strengths and weaknesses in the current system, most recently the WolfReview (2011). This paper does not attempt to cover old ground, but to look at morebasic questions: What are the purposes of vocational qualifications? Are they fit forthose purposes? While the first question has been addressed in policy and scholarlycircles, less attention has been paid to the second question. This paper draws onliterature related to the validity of assessment, because an award of a vocationalqualification rests on a candidate’s successful performance on particular types ofassessment tasks. It examines conceptions of validity and their implications for theinterpretation of assessment results. The review shows that judging the validity ofvocational qualifications is much more complicated than the architects of NationalVocational Qualifications envisioned. The purposes of vocational qualifications haveexpanded and also vary for different stakeholders. The paper argues that the extent towhich vocational qualifications support valid inferences for different purposesremains largely unexplored.
