The Golden age of BTEC: the business education curriculum in 1980s further education

This article provides an account of ‘three generations’ of the Business Education
Council (BEC)/Business and Technician (later Technology) Education Council
(BTEC) curriculum as implemented in further education colleges between 1979 and
1992. There is discussion of aspects of the underlying philosophy of BEC/BTEC, the
structure and content of the programmes, skills, assessment, work experience,
learning strategies, and aspects of monitoring and quality control. It is argued that
BEC/BTEC, through a form of vocational progressivism, successfully transformed
pedagogic practices in FE during the 1980s. The advent of the National Council for
Vocational Qualifications, however, and the subsequent introduction of General
Advanced Vocational Qualifications in 1993 effectively marked the end of the ‘BEC/
BTEC’ era and the establishment of a more directly instrumentalist approach to
vocational education.