Will dual sector universities lead the tertiary sector on governance arrangements, asks John Mitchell. With more TAFE institutes offering degrees and an increasing number of private providers straddling the divide between VET and higher education, new governance issues are emerging ...

VET courses do more for unemployed people with disabilities than for other unemployed people, according to a new study. People who have disabilities do much worse in the labour market than people who don’t. That’s one of the unsurprising conclusions ...

COAG has vowed to lift its game, with improvements in VET performance between 2009 and 2020. But new data reveals the magnitude of the improvements required. VET will have to improve its performance markedly to meet the COAG targets, the ...

Is it possible to rank VET teachers’ skills and knowledge, asks John Mitchell. There are moves afoot to define teaching standards for all school teachers in Australia, so the question follows as to whether standards can be set for VET ...

There is a message for vocational training in the recent Toyota crisis, writes Larry Smith. For decades, the name Toyota has been synonymous with quality production, performance and safety in automobiles. In recent weeks, however, that reputation has taken a ...

Can public secondary schools teach VET providers anything about innovation, asks John Mitchell. In the minds of many VET providers, innovation in relation to student engagement is not a top priority at the moment. Providers are preoccupied with several new ...

A culture of continuous improvement is least effective in the most needy, writes Anita Roberts. Who wants to talk about continuous improvement? Within VET, and probably elsewhere, it is difficult to use the term without accompanying grimaces and eye-rolling. It ...

Government spending on universities and schools barely kept pace with inflation in the latter years of the Howard government. But spending on public VET went backwards. Universities might have cried poor during the Howard years. But they did a hell ...

Workforce data for VET lags way behind what’s available on higher education, with studies offering vastly different estimates of how many people work in the sector. While TAFEs provide 70 per cent or more of VET in Australia, a new ...

Can disengaged apprentices be helped to return to a trade and succeed, asks John Mitchell. The skills shortage in the period before the global financial crisis was so severe that employers were willing to recruit people whom, in normal times, ...