VET takeover proposal applauded

A nationally run vocational education and training system – widely considered as desirable, but politically unfeasible – is now on the cards, with the Bradley review panel calling for the federal government to assume full responsibility for regulating all post-school education by 2010. “It is no longer helpful to see stark contrasts between higher education and VET in the level and types of qualifications they deliver,” the report says.

“The differences are shifting. The vocational and professional focus of higher education has grown in recent years and VET has responded to the demands of industry for higher level skills by re-focusing on middle-level and advanced training.”

Like student-centred funding, a more integrated tertiary education system had been widely anticipated among Bradley’s recommendations. But she exceeded expectations, saying VET and higher education should be regulated by a single body under national control – and national funding. “I was surprised the review committee was as bold as to recommend that,” the vice-chancellor of the dual-sector Swinburne University, Professor Ian Young, told Campus Review.

Bradley told CR a national VET system was essential to improve its competitiveness. “The federal system we have at present is not terribly helpful for a small country like Australia attempting to re-tool itself to meet this very competitive international situation,” she said.

Bradley said an overarching body would help sort out the bewildering array of regulatory and advisory bodies now operating in Australian higher education and particularly VET – graphically represented in two governance charts reproduced in the report.

“Look at the mess we have nationally. There is no clear architecture for getting advice about industry needs in a systematic and coherent way, and translating that advice across the whole tertiary system. There are actually two systems, one of which – higher education – has no systematic information coming to it.”

The proposal has few detractors, with the University of Melbourne’s Professor Simon Marginson noting that even a state premier – Anna Bligh of Queensland – recently advocated a Commonwealth takeover of VET. “Bringing VET and HE closer together, giving VET an unequivocal role in delivering degrees and establishing a common accreditation structure are significant moves. They create a unified tertiary education sector to a degree.”

Dr Leesa Wheelahan, senior lecturer in adult and vocational education at Griffith University, applauded the unified sector proposal and related recommendations. “A single ministerial council with responsibility for all post-school education is an excellent idea. A single advisory body to government, one national regulatory and quality assurance agency, making HECS available for diplomas and advanced diplomas – terrific, absolutely terrific, and well overdue.”

Martin Riordan, CEO of TAFE Directors Australia, said the proposal was visionary and timely. “The government will have a good opportunity now to respond with some realistic measures to overhaul the sector.”

Geof Hawke, senior research fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, said a more unified tertiary system could help fix inequities. “At the moment, in effect, we’ve got competing systems. A lot of savvy young people have been doing diplomas and advanced diplomas in TAFE and transferring with significant credit into university degrees, and saving themselves a motza on HECS.

“It’s created a competition climate where TAFEs are seen as creaming off potential income from universities, which in the current financial position.”

But it’s far from a done deal. “It’ll still be very challenging to get the federal and all the state governments to agree to this,” said Young. “There’s a growing groundswell of support, so I think the possibilities are strengthening. It is still going to require a remarkable degree of collaboration between governments.”

Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Professor Greg Craven, a constitutional lawyer, said it would take more than cooperation. “I wonder whether VET and universitiess are as compatible as the report suggests – not so much educationally as constitutionally,” he said.

“When you look at this national body with the power to accredit unis, is that problematic in terms of the social place universities are meant to hold? I’m not saying it is, but that is what I would be thinking about – because unis are a check and balance on government. They are cultural institutions. Universities deal in ideas and VET deals in education and training. I don’t think VET providers are cultural institutions.”

But Marginson said he was confident a unified sector was achievable. “It could come unstuck, but I don’t think it will. If TAFEs roll over and accept it, as they did in the 1970s with the transfer of CAEs to the Commonwealth, then it will happen. Once Queensland has come on board, NSW can’t hold out forever – especially in the state the NSW government is in at the moment.

“The NSW TAFE Commission has been a stumbling block to federal takeover. I think we are now seeing the end of that period. Keating floated the idea when he ran against Hawke in the 1990s. It has been on the federal agenda since.”

Wheelahan said Bradley’s VET recommendations would need to be implemented comprehensively if they were to work. “Most of the proposals are focused on diplomas and advanced diplomas. It needs to extend to lower level VET as well, because unless the Commonwealth takes responsibility for all of VET, you’re going to have a residual VET system left in the states.”

And both Wheelahan and Young criticised the panel’s failure to recommend specific solutions to one of VET’s main bugbears – articulation between the sectors. “They’ve winked it on the credit transfer stuff. This is going to do nothing, really, to increase the level of student articulation from TAFE to HE. It’s not going to get TAFE articulators into the University of Melbourne,” Wheelahan said.

Bradley said she’d treated articulation cautiously because she didn’t want to see VET “subsumed into being just feeders to higher education”.

“One of the strongest arguments for a tertiary system is to get the linkages better, but you have to get the balance right,” she said.

“VET is a real system which educates people for real jobs. The US community colleges system doesn’t have the strength of the VET system in Australia. Here, if you do a VET qualification above level III, you are doing it for a proper job. It’s really important that we don’t lose that strength in some move toward seeing VET as just some articulation point into higher education. That would be insane.”

Bradley said architecture was the key. “We believe if you get the framework right you can deal with situations like articulation without damage to either sector. There has been some sensible work done around how to improve articulation, such as graded qualifications in higher levels of VET.”

Hawke said the lack of grades had hampered credit transfer for decades, often for technical and administrative reasons. “Most universities switched to using admissions authorities to admit and enrol people. Those authorities couldn’t cope. The whole logic of those systems is you’ve got to score people. When people came in with a bunch of competencies, they’d say, the only meaningful thing we can do is give them all 50. They never scored high enough to get selected.”

Hawke said a lot of VET systems had started developing graded outcomes, particularly with higher level qualifications. “It makes sense. A lot of employers have asked for it too, even in the trades.”

But Wheelahan said the problem would only be fixed through the sorts of institutional targets and incentives Bradley has recommended to bolster the enrolment of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. “Only 10 per cent of students are admitted to higher education on the basis of their TAFE studies. Governments have been trying to increase this for ages.

“The evidence is that the elite universities have to be bribed or forced to take them – in the same way they’re being bribed or forced to take students from low SES backgrounds, in this report.”

Most commentators who spoke to CR supported Bradley’s insistence that the distinctive characters of higher education and VET must be preserved. But the peak private provider body, while supporting Bradley’s proposals, said a national regulator and funding weren’t enough. “Our view is that you need a single tertiary education system that has one national mission,” said Andrew Smith, executive officer with the Australian Council for Private Education and Training.

“We would like to see a single national system – an integrated continuum – and get rid of the artificial barriers and structures that sit between vocational and higher education.”

Meanwhile, Riordan said Bradley hadn’t gone far enough in her recommendation of a 10 per cent increase in the base funding for teaching and learning in higher education. “We think that should be extended across the entire tertiary sector,” he said.

“We note that in many of these proposals, the detailed structure and funding have all been left to negotiations. One of our challenges – and a challenge for the government itself – is making sure there’s enough goodwill for that to take place.”

VET strategist Dr John Mitchell said there was no time to lose. “I believe we have a window of three to four months to educate the decision makers that VET, as Bradley says, has a role to play that is much bigger than providing fodder for student-starved unis.”