Rationalization in Australian Vocational Education and Training

Since the late 1980s the Australian vocational education and training system has gone through successive waves of reform, in an effort to create a quality system offering national vocational qualifications. Each reform round has been a response to a 'quality crisis' in a system marked by jurisdictional fragmentation, competing employer agendas, and (since 1996) marginalisation of organised labour from policymaking and governance. These waves are summarised, and issues arising from reliance on competency based training and assessment in the context of market-oriented training reform are analysed. Resulting difficulties are illustrated in two 2009 initiatives: the attempt to create a new internationallyharmonised qualifications framework, and the development of a framework for recognising workplace learning. ' (Hampson and Junor, 2010, forthcoming) is used to suggest that training outcomes need to be understood in a context of the organisation of the labour process. The problem of defining the exact nature of human capacity that is the object of skills development, and building that into recognition structures, is a problem that confronts any national training system: how it is resolved is determined by the relative power of the social partners.

As the successful implementation of competitive VET markets enters into a predictable decline trajectory, it is incumbent upon policy makers to consider post-market options. This article explores the potential of optimising the notional national training system. In order to understand how this might be achieved, a discourse analysis of selected maps of the intended system from points of discontinuity along the policy trail is undertaken to demonstrate how Australian executive federalism has produced VET policy for the past three decades. This process exposes the existence of multiple realities that can be simultaneously experienced which, in turn, creates conceptual confusion as to what VET is and what is expected of it. By understanding the power of discourses to bring into existence the things they describe and how this activity is conducted, it becomes possible to contemplate future directions in the development of public policies for vocational education and training.

International Journal of Training Research, 2016

Australia's vocational education and training (VET) qualifications comprise units of competency that are bundled together in qualifications and nestled in training packages developed for particular industries. This article argues that this model is broken and cannot be fixed by patching bits of the system. Competencybased training (CBT) is based on an atomistic ontology that results in the fragmentation of knowledge and the atomisation of skill. CBT underpins a fragmented VET system with thousands of qualifications. It facilitates a market that has resulted in: thousands of private providers; the erosion of technical and further education (TAFE) institutions as the public provider; the transfer of unprecedented amounts of public funding to private profits; and, scandals and rorts. The same atomistic ontology underpins VET qualifications, the VET system and the VET market. The article concludes by briefly discussing an alternative model of qualifications using the capabilities approach.

Journal of Education and Work, Vol.2, pp. 126-146

This article argues that the current social settlement underpinning vocational education and training (VET) in Australia is fractured. The current settlement is low trust and consists of qualifications based on competency-based training models of curriculum and competitive markets. The result is narrow qualifications that do not prepare people for jobs associated with the qualifications, and the decimation of technical and further education (TAFE) institutes which are the public providers of VET. The article develops a conceptual framework by integrating various literatures that are broadly consistent with institutionalist theories, including the Varieties of Capitalism literature, Raffe’s and colleagues model of intrinsic and institutional logics, and literatures on skills ecosystems and educational and labour market transitions. This analysis shows why VET has such a low status in Anglophone liberal market economies. A new social settlement is needed that recognises the diverse purposes played by VET qualifications, underpinned by a differentiated model of VET qualifications that does not tie the outcomes of learning so tightly to particular occupations. Such a model would recognise that some qualifications will have tighter links to occupations than others.

Education and Training, 2001

International Journal of Training and Development, 2010

❒ Erica Smith, Professor of Education and Dean of Graduate Studies at

The book is a policy history of the institutions established to manage vocational education and training in Australia since its nineteenth century origins. It utilises modern policy theory as a conceptual framework and explores several hypotheses derived from the contemporary Australian literature on federalism. Its central argument seeks to establish that vocational education policy has oscillated between two ideals, one strictly utilitarian, the other with a broader educational goal. Parallel is an exploration of why vocational education intermittently intrudes into high politics, but is largely ignored at remaining times.

This is a submission to the Australian Senate inquiry into vocational education and training in South Australia, which was established by conservatives to try to attack the South Australian Labor Government before the forthcoming election. In it I argue that the problems with public vocational education in South Australia are shared by all other Australian states and result from the fragmentation of financing, student loans, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and quality assurance. I argue further that Australian vocational education and training policy also suffers by being fragmented between the Australian and State and Territory governments. This Senate review of Tafe SA perpetuates and exacerbates this fragmentation of vocational education and training policy, as if the South Australian Government’s policy and funding of vocational education and training were unrelated to its funding agreements with the Australian Government, vocational education student loans, standards, quality assurance and related issues.

National Centre For Vocational Education Research, 2007