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This article attempts to trace the origins of competency-based training (CBT), the theory of vocational education that underpins the National Training Framework in Australia. A distinction is made between societal and theoretical origins. This paper argues that CBT has its societal origins in the United States of America during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Public debate and government initiatives centred on the widely held view that there was a problem with the quality of education in the United States. One of the responses to this crisis was the Performance-Based Teacher Education movement which synthesised the theory of education that became CBT. The theoretical origins of CBT derive principally from behaviourism and systems theory - two broad theoretical orientations that influenced educational debate in the United States during the formative period of CBT. Most of the component parts of CBT were contributed by specialists with a background in one or both of these theoretical orientations.
Introduction
The Australian National Training Framework - the government-endorsed national system of vocational education and training CVET) - rests on the principles of competency-based training (CBT). However, contemporary practitioners within Australia's VET system are often only vaguely aware that CBT was once a hotly contested issue. Furthermore, training practitioners often do not know the societal and theoretical origins of CBT. But these origins are not necessarily of mere historical interest. Although CBT appears to be something of a 'given' in the Australian VET scene, it remains an essentially volatile system set within a dynamic context. As the needs of VET stakeholders change and as research and practice in VET reveal new problems and possibilities, CBT will change and potentially transform. When this occurs the 'genetics' of CBT will play a part in the shape it eventually takes.
However, at this stage there are few resources for researchers on the history of CBT. In the clamorous rush to implement CBT, there has been little effort to chronicle the genesis of the movement. A few pages can be found in synoptic works by authors such as Houston (1974), Norton, Harrington and Gill (1978), Tuxworth (1989) and Harris, Guthrie, Hobart and Lundberg (1995), but these accounts are mostly sketches designed to contextualise substantial treatments of problems of interpretation and implementation. The present...