The need for educational and training activities is often regarded as self evident, and investments in them made as acts of faith. The aims of such activities are often ambiguous and, one suspects, differently perceived by different interested parties. Ambiguity over goals and lack of clear knowledge of how to achieve them and whether they are achieved are clearly closely related. Furthermore these phenomena probably also contribute to, and are contributed to by, lack of coherent strategies of evaluation of educational and training projects. If lack of clarity and consensus on education and training goals, lack of certainty about whether and how they are achieved, and absence of coherent evaluation strategies constitute a “vicious circle”, in which each problem is reinforcing the others, then building a coherent evaluation strategy may be the only point at which it is possible to break the cycle.