The idea of a national qualifications framework (NQF) has its intellectual roots in the competence approach to vocational education which was broadened by Jessup (1991) and others in England, who developed the idea that all qualifications could (and should) be expressed in terms of outcomes without prescribing any specific learning pathway or programme. However, neither the idea of competence nor those of an NQF were developed primarily to solve the problems of the qualification system. Both are best understood, at least in the cases of the United Kingdom (UK) and New Zealand, in the context of the emerging neo-liberal economic policies of the 1980s and early 1990s which emphasized the primary role of the private sector in economic development.
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Young, M.F. (2009). National Qualifications Frameworks: An Analytical Overview. In: Maclean, R., Wilson, D. (eds) International Handbook of Education for the Changing World of Work. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5281-1_188
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