One of the last pieces of VET work I am undertaking before I really retire is co-authored with my long-term colleague and ‘partner in crime’ Melinda Waters. It focuses on VET and conceptions of its quality. Watch out for when it is hopefully published sometime next year thorough NCVER’s VOCEDplus Research database because it will try to take a hard look on the identified landmark VET papers and reports, and the wide range of other work, which have addressed VET quality issues. Thus, as part of my ‘swansong’ for VDC News, I thought it was worth taking a quick look at issues related to the sector’s quality we will address in this paper.
Quality, its measurement, and judgements about it, have all been long standing issues in the sector. Many of the sector’s pivotal reports talk about it, whether this be about the lack of it, or what is needed to enable and facilitate its improvement. Needless to say, views on what is really needed are many and varied, and often depend on the views particular stockholders have about what aspects of quality are most important.
Quality is important to students who rely on VET outcomes to gain employment or career advancement and also to have their individual needs met. Employers and communities rely on VET providers to develop essential skills and knowledge for both new entrants and existing workers and to meet local community and other needs. Governments rely on the sector and its providers to enact their policies and help meet their goals. Providers rely on regulators to provide a balanced yet rigorous approach to regulation as well as one that encourages innovation and flexibility while ensuring quality and facilitating its improvement.
At the end of the day, though, I think what really makes for a quality VET system is the quality of its providers and their staff. They are, in my view, the engine room and the engineers, of the sector. One concern, though, is the damage the popular press and other reports about the sector can do to perceptions of the sector’s quality. This is when their articles and reports suggest that some providers are really not doing their job, and when they focus on the inadequacies and failures of particular providers. We know that some – and I believe in truth only a few – providers do not do the ‘right thing.’ However, unbalanced stories about them, and the generalities these reports suggest, can do considerable and inordinate damage to the reputations of the many providers doing the right thing, and also to the sector as a whole. In short, bad news stories about ‘the few’ are bad for ‘the many’!
Thus, how do we know what’s good? As the many readers of VDC News know, providers use a range of data and other information to measure and judge their quality and success, but the measures will vary in emphasis according to what they do and how they work. In addition, their perceptions of quality and success may not be the same as other VET stakeholders – particularly governments.
In work Melinda and I did in 2021 and 2022, we suggested that what constitutes high-quality VET provision differs among provider types, depending on what their purposes, missions and goals are as well as their types of students and the range of courses and qualifications they offer, and the context in which they operate. The key principles underpinning a definition of high-quality in VET, though, are concerned with how well
students are achieving, how well they are supported and encouraged to learn, how well broader stakeholders’ needs and purposes are met and how well an individual provider adapts to changing stakeholder and workplace needs.
Another interesting feature of the quality debate apparent in the debate about VET quality is a call for consistency of offerings, while also calling for innovation and flexibility of approach. These can be hard to reconcile potentially, but what we may really be talking about here, I think, is a consistent minimum and dependable quality whilst also promoting the idea of providers really striving for improvement and excellence over and above this.
There is much a provider can do about the quality of what it does: strong leadership and management, an excellent workplace culture and having a concern for supporting and building the capabilities of its workforce through effective recruitment and retention strategies as well as by high quality and relevant induction training and ongoing professional development. This also needs to balance individual, work unit and workplace needs. Thus, the recently released VET Workforce Blueprint has suggested 3 important opportunities for quality improvement:
- Making it easier for high-quality teachers, trainers and assessors to enter and stay in the VET workforce
- Providing more support for early career teachers, trainers and assessors, and
- Supporting professional learning, career progression and industry currency.
There are things can get in the way of quality and its improvement, though – especially external factors which can adversely affect, or even prevent, providers doing the best they can. These factors include policy that is not fit for purpose, the marketisation of the sector, the quality of Training Packages, over-regulation and a compliance mentality and a restrictive conception of competency – all of which may restrict the necessary freedom of action of good VET providers
Finally, and happily I think, there are signs that conceptions about VET and the balance between its various missions and priorities are adjusting in a good way. I sense a rebalancing between the very strong views about VET being industry led and focused on meeting industry’s needs that developed and persisted in the Dawkins era of the late 1980s and into the 1990s. These emphasised addressing an immediacy of purpose for all that VET did. But I sense a swing back towards a view of VET and its mission that Kangan proposed back in 1974, that is: one which balances the needs of industry and employers with one that also gives due emphasis to meeting of the longer term skill and capability needs of individual VET learners. If one can get this balance right, it means that VET students develop life-long learning and other 21st Century capabilities that many in industry actually want their staff to have.
