Apart from having meaningful qualifications with which to leave school, the transition from schooling to further study is a vital part to any education system. To this end, this paper asks how well this process is currently being managed in Kazakhstan. Although the research question centres upon Kazakhstan as a case study, its objectives are wider in providing insight to other national systems when often stakeholders’ roles in the design process are potentially disjointed, uninvited or unclear. The paper explores how wholesale educational reform attends to transitions as well as the individual components of an educational system particularly in how a proposed lead on reform to Higher Education through the Bologna Process (2001) pans out elsewhere. This allows broader application of the paper to other post-soviet nations (Bethell & Zabulionis, 2012) in which educational values are shifting from assessment through knowledge content to alternative models of an “outcome-orientated” (UNESCO, 2012, p8) or “learning-outcomes” (EQF, 2008) approach. How this impacts on more general tensions in understanding of educational attainment is presented as a very real crux in the entire reform process in Kazakhstan. The conceptual frameworks used comprise: an initial analysis of secondary data sources that describe the emergence and process of the Unified National Test (UNT); followed by a social constructionist approach towards thematic analysis of primary data from central figures in the educational reform process in Kazakhstan as they discuss the UNT.

In more detail, this paper describes the background to the 2004 introduction of a national measure (UNT) in Kazakhstan to assist higher education in the selection of candidates based on merit rather than previous practices which many saw as highly subjective and open to corruption (Drummond, 2011). It discusses how such a measure operates to assess school performance, functions as a school exit qualification in its own right and is generally fit for purpose. As part of the retrospective, the Kazakhstan experience provides a unique contribution in studying the evolution of qualifications to sit within a yet to be published National Qualifications Framework (NQF). Beyond this, the NQF will at some point require national explanation of its alignment with the European Qualifications Framework (EQF, 2008) and ISCED classifications (OECD, 2012). So positioning and designing a school-leaving qualification to be seen as quality assured for international appraisal and confidence is, and has been, a clear imperative that informs upon how others undergoing educational reform (e.g. Russia as described in Nikolaev & Chugunov, 2012)  may choose to proceed. Furthermore, stripping back the purpose and stakeholder demands upon a qualification forming part of a fast-moving schedule of educational change, such as that found in Kazakhstan, has benefits in more established national educational contexts. The policy-borrowing and associated review of international models not only informs upon best practices and suitability in transfer and translation to a Kazakhstani context but also illustrates praise-worthy and deficient aspects of models elsewhere such as an apparent almost universal disconnect between learning taxonomies and published national qualification frameworks.

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