Curriculum and “Training Package”: A Changing Mode of Governance in Australian Vocational Education and Training

Abstract

This paper traces changes in one of the modes of governance in vocational education and training in Australia. This was achieved by displacing a vaguely defined, but nevertheless robust notion of curriculum which played a role in the governance of vocational education in the Australian states for nearly two hundred years, becoming demonstrably unsustainable as a mode of governance under a differently constituted national system which incorporated 'work-place training' into accredited courses. As an assemblage of routine classroom practices curriculum is performed in different modalities: demonstrating a plasticity of form that has afforded it a singular level of durability. Since the seventeenth century curriculum has articulated schooling as first a middle class and then general Western cultural form, eventually becoming a vehicle for government educational policy. During the 19080s Australian vocational curriculum became a pre-eminent instrument of policies aimed at establishing a national training system. Through that process curriculum took on a role as policy: moving into domains way beyond its original relational and territorial boundaries. By the mid-1990s the socio-economic relations of fast capital and the demands posed on vocational skill development by a globalising economy had extended the reach of curriculum-as-policy beyond the limits of its managerial elasticity, Curriculum-as-policy finally collapsed in 1996, under the weight of its own highly-engineered constituents and the expectations visited upon it. As a mode of governance, curriculum was quite suddenly displaced by a mechanism with a more modest brief, and a correspondingly broader reach. This was a device named, somewhat ambiguously, as the `Training Package?, and articulated as multiple `Training Packages?. In this moment of change, definitive categories (school/workplace; learner/worker; teacher/supervisor; state/market) wavered, and new modes of ordering and governance coalesced in the ontic spaces that were opened as a result.