Call for quality and consistency in VET assessments

Two years after an OECD report nailed Australia’s VET system for slow and cumbersome policy development, reform is still desperately needed writes Susan Woodward VET experts said Australia had not taken up many of the recommendations outlined in the 2008 OECD report – and reiterated in a final comparative report released this week – especially the call to simplify training packages and standardise apprenticeships. “I suggest that many of the problems with the quality of Australian vocational education are due to the local, highly variable and largely unverified assessment of student learning,” said Gavin Moodie, policy adviser to RMIT University. “Australia should therefore consider seriously the OECD’s recommendation on ‘the creation of frameworks of standardised national assessment in order to underpin quality and consistency in apprenticeship systems’, and I would extend that to all vocational education over time.” The final OECD report outlines the link between VET and future economic wealth and social inclusion. It identifies a propensity in nearly all OECD countries for VET models that cannot keep pace with rapidly changing labour markets. And it says governments need to work closely with employers and unions to reform VET with new programs that balance the needs of industry and workers. “The theme that’s really strong in the report, which we’re just beginning to look at here, is the importance of ensuring students have the academic knowledge they need to proceed to higher levels of study, and the generic skills they need to be able to work in a wide variety of different contexts,” said Leesa Wheelahan, associate professor with the L.H. Martin Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Management at the University of Melbourne. She explained that the OECD report warned against “firm specific” training, which could result in “just a form of cheap labour”. “That’s something that we have to think about because the structure of our [VET] qualifications tends to lend itself to that kind of model,” Wheelahan said. In this way, she said the nation was languishing under 1988 Dawkins reforms that recommended competency-based training on specific workplace tasks and goals. Spending time at the workplace was obviously essential, but not “at the expense of the broader knowledge bases that students need”, she said. All levels of Australian government agreed VET needed to give students wider sustainability, language, literacy and numeracy skills. “[But] these things are not well developed in current VET qualifications,” Wheelahan said. Of the eight recommendations specific to Australia, Moodie also supported the idea that students should be entitled to pursue VET qualifications free of charge up to certificate II or III, and pay through HECS for higher-level VET qualifications. “Currently, vocational students are charged fees for certificate II and III studies while they wouldn’t be charged for studies at the same level at school,” he said. “This potentially distorts students’ study choices. “Victoria has introduced income contingent loans for higher-level vocational education programs, but it restricts eligibility by too many conditions which are impossible for prospective students to understand without detailed information from an advisor.” Wheelahan said some of the OECD recommendations were making their way into Australia’s VET system. Perhaps most notable was introducing market mechanisms for providing VET, with the Victorian government planning to initiate a full market-driven system for higher-level VET qualifications in 2011. That was one measure that Wheelahan could not support, however. “The main point of the VET system is to provide people with access to qualifications they need to enter the labour market and to participate as citizens in their community,” she said. “Markets can help, that but not if the whole point of the system is the market itself. “However, we’ve lost that fight, I think.”