Australian VET Research Articles

Reasonable adjustment for inclusive development: a cautionary case study of Australian VET teachers’ experience

PurposeVocational education and training (VET) in Australia has for some time been driven by an agenda of “reasonable adjustment”, in which practices are modified to ensure equitable access and participation by disadvantaged students. However, the growing marketization of VET has instead encouraged the use of more flexible approaches to attract and retain students from diverse backgrounds. They have thus paralleled and confounded reasonable adjustment practices for inclusive development. This study sought to identify the moral dilemmas experienced by VET teachers arising from implementing reasonable adjustment practices.Design/methodology/approachThis phenomenological research project used in-depth conversational interviews with 19 experienced VET teachers from a diversity of teaching fields to identify moral dilemmas experienced as arising from changes in their workplace contexts.FindingsOne of the identified dilemmas was responding flexibly to heightened student diversity, to which study participants largely responded by prioritising the economic imperative over social inclusion. Well-intended actions thus led to unintentionally damaging outcomes, raising important ethical questions about the relative value of economic and social development outcomes and the role of reasonable adjustment in their attainment. The study also highlights the lack of appropriate VET teacher training in managing ethical conflicts to minimise risks to themselves and their employing organizations.Originality/valueAs a case study of inclusive development policies in practice, this research may be seen as a cautionary tale for inclusive development policies in other countries with similarly strong VET economic and socially inclusive development policies for sustainability. The paper thus opens a dialogue for critical reflection on the current problems in a reasonable development approach in the field of comparative and international education. Those two parallel agendas have presented VET teachers and trainers with ethically challenging situations in which the economic and social development imperatives are experienced as being conflict with each other.

The results of asking a deceptively simple question: what is for sale in Australian VET markets?

ABSTRACT Assuming Australian training markets represent successful policy implementation facilitates an exploration of the implications for their future evolution by querying what is sold in these markets. A Foucauldian discourse analysis of relevant documentation suggests that training markets overwhelmingly provide products and/or services. Further examination finds that these two are conceptually confused as is the contention of a single national vocational education and training market. Ontological rhetorics have been used to indiscriminately conflate products and services in pursuit of preferred political values. The performative work being done by uncritically mingling the discourses of two distinctively different markets for bureaucratic and political purposes, when combined with executive federalism, contributes to VET’s exasperating complexity. Brief transactions that provide multiple useful, yet low-value, compliance-driven products differ substantially from markets that deliver educational services by developing longer term relationships that increase the national stock of higher level occupational skills. Making explicit the different perspectives that have fashioned the product and services artefacts invites more tailored market operational and regulatory approaches as well as creating the possibility of a more inclusive approach to VET policy making and delivery of vocational knowledges.

Applying discourse analysis to Australian national VET policy: more than one, less than many

ABSTRACT VET researchers and policy-makers have historically displayed a keen interest in the future. Two assumptions link VET to the future. The first is that there is a singular object called VET and, secondly, that it can influence a forthcoming state of reality. This relationship is investigated through a rarely utilised post-structuralist discourse analysis of Australia’s development of national vocational education and training policies. The performative language of policy-makers treats VET as a singular object and portrays the future as rational and predictable. By demonstrating that VET and potential realities exist in multiple forms, it might be possible to better utilise VET’s capacities to produce more desirable national futures. The findings suggest that despite continual reform of the sector, just three strategic positions and their supportive discourses have guided federated policy making. The first generally neglected technical and adult education, followed by the creation of a federally funded novel type of educational institution which eventually led to the establishment of VET quasi-markets. Each underpinning discourse exploited the productive power of language to give effect to governments’ desire to improve manifold futures by deploying alternative versions of VET.

Entering India's formal skills market: The case of Australian VET providers

Entering India's formal skills market: The case of Australian VET providers

When the whole is more than the sum of its parts: investigating ways that advanced skills for VET teachers are conceptualised and how they are developed

This thesis reports on an interpretive inquiry undertaken to understand how advanced skills for Australian VET teachers are conceptualised and developed. There is a large body of work which focuses...

Podcasting combines my passion for vet nursing and my capacity for creativity

Australian vet nurse Cat Robinson runs Radio Vet Nurse, a podcast series that aims to inspire all vet nurses to be the best they can be.

Raymond John Imberger

Always known as ‘the Australian vet’, he had an integral role at a number of equine studs. His empathy and intuition with animals were renowned.

Working in Singapore has been rewarding both professionally and financially

Australian vet Shane Ryan owns the Companion Animal Surgery in Singapore. He has lived and worked in the country since 1984. He is president‐elect of the World Small Animal Veterinary Association.

Towards a more systematic approach to continuing professional development in vocational education and training

ABSTRACTVocational education and training (VET) teachers and trainers have a key role in ensuring that workers in business and industry are upskilled and up-to-date in a rapidly changing industrial, economic and technological environment. It follows that the VET practitioners should themselves keep up to date, not only with industry developments but also with the pedagogical skills needed to embrace technology and adapt to new sites for learning. However, in Australia and other Western nations, continuing professional development for VET practitioners has been spasmodic and not always well supported, in contrast to the ways it has been established and accepted in other professions. This paper examines the professional development approaches of some of those other professions and identifies the key features that might be adopted in any genuine attempt to develop a more purposeful and systematic provision of ongoing learning for teachers and trainers in VET. The paper concludes with a number of recommendations aimed at Australian VET practitioners in particular, but which might be applicable to VET in any developed country.

Working their way to school completion: a snapshot of School-based Apprenticeships and Traineeships for young Australians

This paper highlights troubling patterns within the Australian School-based Apprenticeships and Traineeships (SBATs) by analysing statistical data of 21,000 of 15–19 year old apprenticeship/traineeship learners engaged in Vocational Education and Training in School (VETiS). It confirms the alignment of social groups to certain qualification fields and levels and provides a compelling picture of the learner profile of SBAT including the type of occupations and qualifications being undertaken at school level. In a complex policy environment, where VET in Schools has been assigned the important task of preparing ‘workforce job-ready’ students for the ‘high skill and high earning roles our economy demands’, we argue that the SBAT pathway is not yet adequate to meet these high expectations. It is not an effective apprenticeship pathway as it potentially ‘locks-in’ already disadvantaged young people to precarious pathways, and reinforces the nature of an already highly gender-segregated Australian labour market. The paper helps to focus attention on endemic weaknesses in the Australian VET system that serve to entrench disadvantage in Australian society.

What do we learn from 40 years of history? Issues in VET teacher education from Kangan to today

Francesca Beddie asserts that ‘history … currently plays little part in governmental processes and does not meet its potential as a contributor to wider policy debate’. Adopting a book-ends approach in analysing two critical periods of time four decades apart – 1974–81 and 2011–16 – this paper examines key issues in Australian VET teacher education in the 1970s and compares them with the present. It aims to address the question: What has been learnt over that time? Through comparative historical research, a method of social science that examines historical events in order to seek explanations by comparison (in this instance) with the present day, it also seeks to understand the reasons for the rise and decline of university VET teacher education over this time. Sources include significant conferences, reports and other writings, as well as the lived professional experiences of the author in VET teacher education over those 40 years.

Transforming a Race to the Bottom to a Ladder to the Top: Regulatory Support for Excellence in Australian VET

Vocational education and training once held a proud place in Australia’s education system, providing opportunity along a less academically and more practically oriented path. While interest in and need for vocational education and training has not lost currency, the sector has been drawn into a downward reputational spiral. Reforms have been introduced in abundance to reverse the problems of VET, but instead have contributed to loss of status and scandal after scandal. At the heart of the debilitation of the VET sector has been lack of respect for and support for teaching professionalism in the reform process. Industry and government domination over what was to be taught in VET was intended to create opportunity through growth and jobs, but domination is bound to be doomed when the guardians of delivery and quality are not engaged professionally in the process. In these circumstances, a market methodology is likely to attract markets in ‘bads’ that repeatedly dislodge markets in ‘goods’. Regulation also faces a difficult challenge when it is overlayed on a market where there is deep and persistent internal conflict over the values of the sector. Delivery of quality education and training is much touted, but a schism sits below this mantra. The sector divides in its commitment to professional educators and to the aspiration of being a quality education provider in a highly stratified tertiary sector.

Learning in a less developed country

Volunteering has been an inspiring and life‐enhancing journey for Australian vet Laura Macfarlane, who was given the opportunity to work on an FAO project in Bangladesh

Mentoring the next researcher generation: Reflections on three years of building VET research capacity and infrastructure

During 2008–2011, the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) funded a programme to build Australian VET research capacity and rejuvenate what has been seen as the existing ‘greying’ researcher pool. This paper is a reflective narrative about experiences of constructing the programme with a specific focus on the mentoring activity. It is about researching how we develop VET researchers, and specifically the role that experienced researchers can play. In the first three years, more than 40 experienced VET researchers have been associated with the programme, mainly as mentors and facilitators. These mentors have supported 30 new VET researchers undertaking an initial local VET research project and supervising them through to their subsequent publication with NCVER. This paper focuses on the mentoring that took place and what researchers and research managers can learn from those experiences in terms of building research capacity.This paper reviews the first stages of what has been a participatory action research project for those associated with the programme as the national research infrastructure for new VET researchers was constructed. It evaluates what actions have had the greatest impact and what we can lean from the initiative. It traces the project development from the initial project dilemmas through to the completion and publication of papers. This paper provides a narrative of the relationships that built the programme, focusing upon the mentoring relations striving to bridge both cognitive and geographical divides.The findings indicate that mentoring has played a critical role, and has been established as a essential role in this new VET researcher development pathway. The paper concludes by comparing the components of the Australian programme to a theoretical model and producing guidelines for research mentoring practice that have applicability to related research fields.

The February 2010 Reforms and the International Student Industry

In February 2010 the Australian Government announced a set of reforms to the rules governing access to permanent residence visas and the temporary entry graduate skills visa (485) for overseas students who have completed courses in Australian universities and VET colleges. This article provides a history of Australian policy on the issue and an analysis of the likely impact of the new regulations. It concludes that the government has largely succeeded in de-coupling education in Australia from migration selection. As a result, it is likely that enrolments in the VET sector will shrink and that enrolments in the higher education sector will largely be confined to courses where students obtain qualiications that are of value in the country of origin.

REBUILDING EAST TIMOR - WHAT IS AN AUSTRALIAN VET UP TO?

REBUILDING EAST TIMOR - WHAT IS AN AUSTRALIAN VET UP TO?

Global Trends and Local Bends: Australian Vet Developments

This article explores how Australian governments have responded to global trends for reform of vocational education and training and the pressures for change. Australian VET policy is changing as a consequence of three interrelated factors: the need for VET to develop a sectoral identity in relation to the school and higher education sectors; the interplay of state and federal government relations; and, challenges to the current ‘industry-driven’ paradigm for the sector. There is pressure for VET to move beyond the current framework where VET is regarded principally as an instrument of micro-economic reform, to a broader and more inclusive role. The extent to which change is possible is limited however, by the mandated requirement that all VET qualifications remain within the framework of competency-based, industry-derived national training packages, which are similar to the National Vocational Qualifications in the UK.

Seeking best practice in online learning: Flexible Learning Toolboxes in the Australian VET sector

This paper describes The Flexible Learning Toolboxes Project , a component of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework for the National Vocational Education and Training System 2000-2004 (AFL Framework). The AFL Framework is designed to support the accelerated take-up of flexible learning modes and position Australian VET as a world leader in applying new technologies to vocational education products and services. A Toolbox is a set of learning resources designed for web based delivwww.ascilite.orgs customisation and reuse in the National Training Framework, which forms the basis of qualifications and accreditation in the Australian VET sector. The paper describes aspects of the Project and discusses the innovative design approaches that are being used to create quality online learning resources. Examples of several Toolboxes are provided to demonstrate the forms of online learning settings that have been developed for the Australian VET sector.

"The Door Opens and the Tiger Leaps": Theories and Reflexivities of Comparative Education for a Global Millennium

"The Door Opens and the Tiger Leaps": Theories and Reflexivities of Comparative Education for a Global Millennium