The proportion of 15 to 19 year-old Australians who aren’t involved in employment, education or training is high by international standards, according to a new study for the Australian Social Inclusion Board. But the rate of disengaged 20 to 24 ...

Overworked, overwrought and overrun by managerialism, Joseph Gora ponders the mental health of Australia’s academic workforce. The vexed issue of the casualisation of the academic workforce has been boiling away for many years. Now it seems things have come to ...

Arguments that Australia earns significantly less that $15 billion from international education conceal a hidden agenda, writes Alan Olsen. The current debate about the real value of international education to Australia is a trivial, and ultimately pointless, argument about whether ...

Paul Rodan agrees that journalists new to the international education have trouble grasping the realities of the sector. John Ross is spot-on about recent opportunistic journalism concerning international students (CR, 03.08.09). It must be galling for specialist journalists like him ...

Equity is not an add-on to good teaching, it is part of it. It contributes to the part of teaching that makes it good, says Trevor Gale. Good teaching matters. It has always mattered, but it seems that it has ...

What models from the Australian technical colleges can infiltrate TAFE, asks John Mitchell. After they were announced unexpectedly in 2006, Australian technical colleges polarised opinion in the VET sector. Some people railed against them as the worst idea imaginable, while ...

EIF grants for community-based VET The federal government last week announced 150 grants totalling $96 million to community-based training projects as the final instalment from the Teaching and Learning Capital Fund for Vocational Education (TLCF) announced last December. Grants ranging ...

Universities and TAFEs are too focused on creating complex mechanisms to achieve pathways between VET and higher education, last month’s tertiary sector roundtable was told. The meeting, designed to inform the policy debate on the emerging tertiary education sector, heard ...

There are some demonstrable truths about universities that old prejudices fail to recognise. If they did, there could be change for the good, writes Glenn Withers. Politicians and industry figures in the past have suggested that more competition and more ...

If TAFE is to contribute to meeting government targets for higher education, it needs support to develop academic, disciplinary and institutional cultures, says Leesa Wheelahan. Australia, like other Anglophone countries, is on the cusp of its third major expansion of ...