A qualifications framework is a formalized structure in which learning level descriptors and qualifications are used in order to understand learning outcomes. This allows for the ability to develop, assess and improve quality education in a number of contexts. Qualifications frameworks are typically found at the national, regional, and international level.

The origin of qualification structures can be traced back to organized education in antique civilizations such as Greece, Sparta, Rome and China. As no specialized career structure existed in these cultures, organized education focused on broad issues of international citizenship, and not on professional preparedness, which was achieved mainly through informal apprenticeships. As civilizations developed, the role of social class and caste received more emphasis, and people who displayed certain competences were grouped together. The advantage of having participated in and benefited from education gradually became more visible as civilizations developed. In this respect the Chinese civilization was the most organized, with a series of levels attached to examinations, which in turn granted the right of access to public office. During the Middle Ages education had a particularly religious nature, while the late medieval centuries were categorized by a new approach to education alongside the clergy and feudal knighthood. New economic objectives as a result of the Crusades and the development of banking, importing and shipping across Europe and the West gave rise to the development of cities, and a new form of education aimed at professional life. Education became available to the middle classes, and the merchant and craft guild system developed.

The first institutions of formal higher education were established at this time in the Islamic universities of Al-Azhar in Cairo and Sankore in Timbuktu. By the eleventh century, universities were developing in Europe, largely in reaction to the previous narrow religious doctrine. The establishment of the University of Bologna marked the beginning of the European university tradition. This was also the time when the term 'qualification' acquired a more definite meaning, although it retained its emphasis on social class structures. The nineteenth century brought with it a wave of liberalism and consciousness of equal rights and opportunities, accompanied by increased specialization and bureaucratization. The increased need for skilled employees eventually resulted in an emphasis on credentials which persists to the present day. During the twentieth century the emphasis shifted to human capital theory and technological development, eventually leading to concerns whether the education system was able to meet the demands of the labour market. At the time it was argued that the strong divisions were creating barriers to learning, and that there was a need to do away with the sharp distinction between academic and professional systems.

During the late 1980s, and strongly influenced by the thinking on integration but also by a focus on professional training through a competency approach, the notion of a National Qualification Frameworks (NQF) emerged in the United Kingdom. Its roots lay in the competence approach to professional education which was broadened by Jessup, as well as the Scottish Action Plan which led to the modularization of professional education in Scotland. The idea developed that all qualifications could be expressed in terms of outcomes without prescribing learning pathways or programmes. Within this politically charged melting pot of factors, and a renewed emphasis on the importance of lifelong learning, the first NQFs were established in Australia, England, Scotland, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa between 1989 and 1995. France, as a country with a different tradition from the anglophone countries, was also a member of this group of first-generation NQFs (Bouder, 2003; Keevy et al., 2011). In the case of France, the NQF drew on a hierarchy of qualifications that found official expression at the end of 1960s in a nomenclature which tried to rationalize the number of students leaving the education and training system to correspond with the needs of the labour market.

Across the first-generation countries, NQFs were conceptualized as hierarchical classifications of levels of formal learning programmes and their associated qualifications and certificates. Integral features of NQFs included new quality assurance and standards-setting regimes based on learning outcomes, and importantly for this study, level descriptors which are used to determine the level at which a qualification should be pegged. 

All qualifications frameworks are learning outcomes-based. In qualifications frameworks, qualifications are developed using learning outcomes, and the set of hierarchical levels they consist of are described with a set of learning level descriptors.

Qualifications frameworks emerged from two complementary education and training discourses in the late 1980s: the competence approach to professional education, and the shift to learning outcomes, embedded within the broader concept of lifelong learning. As a result, the interrelationship between competences and learning outcomes was not only firmly embedded in qualifications framework thinking from the very outset, but was also used in a hybridized form.  

A national qualifications framework (NQF) addresses the educational quality concerns of specific countries. Some examples include: