The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) commissioned the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA) to develop guidance on ways in which knowledge and skills could be combined in units of qualifications in the Qualifications and Credit framework (QCF). Stratagia was commissioned to undertake the research and to develop the guidance in collaboration with QCDA.
Feedback from the sector suggested practice was varied and that the existing guidance did not provide adequate detail on this specific area of work. It was intended that the guidance would supplement existing QCDA guidance to contribute to the development of effective practice. An additional aim was to produce guidance that could reduce proliferation and inflation of units where this might occur unnecessarily through the separation of knowledge and skills. This report provides the evidence base for the guidance document that was produced following the research. Although both documents stand alone, and might prove interesting to different audiences, they are also dependent on one another for the content and each document is intended to provide a point of reference for the other.