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This thesis explores the relationship between narrative and pedagogy. Narrative is crucial to both the understanding of an educator’s work and the development of teaching and learning material. It is essential in both a historical and theoretical context where lived and learned experience shape the communicative act of teaching. But what place does analogous narrative have in the binary world of competency based training? The research in this thesis explores the essential link between narrative and pedagogy in vocational education and training (VET) and analyses how that localised connection is disrupted by centrally produced competency-based texts. The texts are Units of Competence; an essential part of all Training Packages which function as the basis of VET assessment. The Units of Competence store descriptive information that should be the basis for curriculum development in VET. Yet the Unit of Competence structure avoids narrative, they are simulations; artefacts of a modernised process that manufactures product devoid of meaning. The meaning excluded from the Unit of Competence creates a space between the reality of the workplace and the practice of vocational education. Yet the space of the missing is also an opportunity. It is proposed that in the gap that opens up between the Unit of Competence and the simulated workplace it represents, lays a seductive space that holds potential for meaning making through narrative. This process recognises and gives life to local-pedagogic practice over the imperatives of centralised bureaucratic generalisations; it preferences the aesthetic over the mechanistic.