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By Geof Hawke, UTS:Education

A great deal of what has become orthodoxy over the past decade is now being re-evaluated as a consequence of the election of a Labor government in Canberra. It is clear that we need to take a similar pause in VET and rethink our role and purposes.

When you look back over the recent history of VET in Australia, the thing that is most striking is both the extent and the diversity over which policy frameworks have ranged. In the past 30 years (really a very short timeframe), vocational education has gone from something rooted within state systems of secondary schooling to a national approach that was primarily post-secondary and is now moving back into the school sector.

At the same time, we've seen the system change from one that was primarily focused on occupational areas at the lower end of the status hierarchy to one that spawned the advanced education sector and that gave a substantial and serious focus to middle-level occupations. It appears to be headed somewhere else now, but no one is clear just where.

Throughout all this time, the sector has been tugged from pillar to post by the prevailing ideology and has striven to do its best to serve the whims of the present political leadership. With few exceptions, however, the many people who populate VET have not said what they believed the sector should be or what its place was in the spectrum of Australian education. It's time we did.

Let me kick off the discussion. I think there are a several key principles that we should assert:

1. Vocational education is a key and vital segment of Australia's system of education. It is a critical element within the economy, but it is not an economic tool to be used by governments to reform employment or industrial structures.

2. Whether or not states continue to hold constitutional responsibility for vocational education, there are clear and powerful reasons for vocational education being organised around consistent national policies.

3. The public interest in setting frameworks and priorities for vocational education involve social and cultural issues at least as much as any other concern. In this context, the needs and wishes of students are as vital a consideration as the needs of industry.

4. Vocational education is not about the provision of employer-ready graduates. It exists to provide well-educated individuals whose education has been vocationally focused and who have the basic skills, knowledge and capabilities to enter employment. Their education has prepared them to be productive and useful employees throughout the following 20-30 years rather than in their first 20- 30 minutes or days.

In a similar vein, I think there are some central ideas that we need to abandon. These include the following:

1. That any single group in our society has a dominant interest in vocational education and should, therefore, be vested with its leadership. Such a view is not acceptable in any other area of education and there is no reason (or experience to argue) it should apply to vocational education.

2. That we can construct artificial high-level abstractions and regard these as curriculum. This is most clearly seen in the consistent failure of ideas about key competencies and employability skills, but applies equally to increasingly generic training packages that are less and less relevant to actual work.

3. That it is possible to use detailed models of workforce planning to identify where training should be focused. Years of experience should have debunked that myth and yet it continues. We know, however, that broad trends can be discerned and taken into account, and that we can build systems that are resilient to short-term fluctuations. The notion of planning isn't wrong, just the model we've elected to follow.

I've no doubt that many people will want to argue with some or all of these assertions. That's fine. It's a debate we really need to have.
What 1 hope we can achieve is that, over the next year or so, all of us in the sector take the time to think about what vocational education is and should be. Then express those thoughts loudly and clearly wherever you can.

All of us, I think, bear considerable responsibility for the current state of vocational education - its good points and its bad. One of the sector's great strengths has been that throughout the often tumultuous years of never-ending change, most of those at the coalface have simply gone on, doing excellent work. We (all Australians) owe a great deal to the many thousands of teachers, tutors and trainers who've kept their eye on the needs of their students and plugged on.

At the same time, that singleminded focus on looking after students has also meant that this sector has been staggeringly quiet at times when it should have erupted and said "no". Vocational education is hardly a blip on the public's conscience and yet, as we know, it is vital to the nation's development in many ways.

Teachers in particular, but all of us involved in vocational education, need to be engaging with all sectors of the community: talking about vocational education - what it does and what it should be doing. It's long past time that vocational education was something every Australian politician understood and cared about. It's up to us.


Geof Hawke is a senior research fellow with the Faculty of Education at the University of Technology, Sydney. Contact geof.hawke@uts.edu.au

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