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In 2004, the South African Education and Labour Relations Council announced that an agreement had been reached to integrate several existing programmes on quality management in education into a new programme entitled Integrated Quality Management System (IQMS) for School-based educators. In order to help educators in a particular Province of South Africa to cope with the demands of this programme, an Advanced Certificate in Education was instituted. The first cohort of teacher-students taking this particular ACE was subsequently subjected to an empirical survey intended to determine the effectiveness of the training. It was found that although the ACE was deemed to be generally helpful for meeting the IQMS requirements, it also failed in several respects. The survey also exposed several aspects of outcomes-based education with which school educators seem to be constantly struggling. Certain changes will have to be made to the ACE itself, but also to the current South African outcomes-based curriculum approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]