The National VET System of Australia - Essay Example

 The National VET System of Australia The Vocational Education and Training (VET) in the Australian context, is a system of education that trains and provides learning to trainees to equip them with the necessary competency and prepare them to meet the requirements of workplaces. The Australian VET is a unified national system, where key competencies are developed in conjunction by the states and the national government implemented through providers accredited with state training authorities. In this respect, the Australian VET system is also a Competency-based Training (CBT) because certain key competencies are implemented uniformly all throughout the different states and territories of the Commonwealth. In addition, the country’s VET system is also characterised as Work-based Learning (WBL) because it is based on a program that takes into consideration work, whether paid or unpaid, as the focus and basis of learning. However, technical education in Australia has not been always nationally unified or CBT or WBL systems. Rather, the country’s VET system has developed and evolved through the years as the country’s response to internal as well as external developments brought about, among others, by recent advancements in technologies, the advent of globalisation and challenges coming from the country’s emerging needs. History of the VET in Australia Although the Commonwealth Government had seen to it that its citizens were furnished the necessary education by establishing a universal primary education and requiring the creation of universities in each and every state in the 1870s, it used to largely view education as a private matter and only for the well to do. Technical education was never in the forefront. The first attempt of the Commonwealth Government in dipping its fingers on issue vocational education was after the severe depression in the 1890s. In 1900, the government created the Royal Commission on Technical Commission headed by Theodore Fink. Another subsequent depression in the 1930s inspired the government to form the Australian Education Council which had for its objective the putting of pressure on the Commonwealth to subsidise technical education in the country. But it was only the Second World War which finally impelled the government to recognise the importance of technical skills (Smith. & Keating 1997). Throughout history, any interest in technical education were shared by the government, the industry, labour, and the entire community such that various technical institutions cropped up like the Mechanics Institute, Schools of Mines (1871 and 1973), the Sydney Working Men’s College (1878), the Melbourne Working Men’s College (1887), the Brisbane Technical College (1871), the South Australian School of Mines and Industry (1889), the Hobart and Launceston (1888), and the Perth Technical School (1990). The lackadaisical interest however, of these sectors was not able to successfully sustain technical education before (Newman 1994). A renewed interest in technical education emerged after the First World War, an interest that failed however to drive technical education to success, although it was during this time that some individual states began establishing their own system of technical education. The advent of the Great Depression and the Second World War re-stirred government interest in education but not in technical education in particular, providing funds for education at the end of the 1930s and creating an education department in 1949, respectively (Smith & Keating 1997). Eventually however, the government started establishing technical colleges, although the effort towards technical education was still relatively minimal. These colleges were able to developed advanced technical courses as years progressed and eventually became universities in the 1980s. Technical education began to take a clear shape in the country with the creation of the Australian Committee on Technical and Further Education in 1973, also known as the Kangan Committee. This Committee studied the technical education in the country and came out with the Kangan Report in 1975, a very important document that turned around the state of technical education in the country. It was this report which caused the creation of the Technical and Further Education (TAFE) sector, which provides for a wide range of largely vocational and technical courses. TAFE served as an instrument to pressure the Commonwealth government to provide funding to technical education. TAFE, initially managed by respective schools, was eventually supervised by separate authorities in each state (Smith & Keating1997). The State of the VET in Australia Today The Australian VET follows the reformed system characterized by the following: it is a unified national system; it is a Competency-Based Training (CBT), and; it is a Work-Based Learning (WBL). The unified national system quality simply refers to the fact that the Australian VET system has common sets of competency standards that are being implemented all throughout the country, in the different states and territories, although by the different state instrumentalities. The idea of competency is based on the expectations of an employer of his employee in the workplace environment and less on the learning process as well as that employee’s ability to transfer and apply his knowledge future situations and environments. A CBT, therefore, is founded on the following principles: it should be able to deliver the competency required by the workplace; the aim of the training program should be the successful acquisition of the required competency rather than the emphasis on the amount of time spent in learning; training qualifications should be the competencies or outcomes gained; the competencies should both be descriptive and flexible; competencies should be demonstrable in the workplace, and; competencies should include generic skills that can be used in all other conditions (Keating 1998). Finally, WBL is “an umbrella term that refers to structured learning that is organisationally managed and provided in association with paid or unpaid (voluntary) work. The focus of workbased learning is learning through work and its participants are the staff employed by an organization. These may be core staff, contract or casual staff or volunteers” (Mitchell, Henry & Young 2001). The Australian VET is however essentially, both a national and state affair. Although the state takes responsibility of its implementation, the Commonwealth, which funds it, shares its administration through the Ministerial Council (MINCO), an assembly of state ministers and the Commonwealth Minister (see Fig. 1). Thus, the competency standards are developed in conjunction by the state and national Industry Training Advisory Bodies (ITABs), on behalf of the industry. These competency standards are then submitted to the National Framework Committee supervised by the Australian National Training Committee (ANTA). The latter was however abolished in 2005. The Committee, if it approves, endorses the competencies to the providers which may be the TAFE colleges, private providers or the industries themselves which they deliver to the students or trainees. These providers are registered with the state training authorities and are answerable to the state ministers. The matter of the allocation of funding, specifically called growth funds, by the Commonwealth, and administered by the ANTA, a body created for the purpose of administering growth funds in projects and programs including the Fig. 1 The National VET System Source: Smith & Keating 1997 VET, is governed by state and territory training profiles. These profiles are themselves created by the states and territories and are plans on how they will allocate growth funds. The Rationale for the VET Reformed System Competency-Based Training. As was previously discussed, CBT refers to the type of learning and training integrated in the present Australian VET that focuses on the acquisition of competency that can be used and made applicable in the workplace. As also previously stated, under the present VET of the country, these competencies as determined by the state and national industry training bodies are uniformly implemented all throughout the several states and territories. Many have, in the past, assailed the CBT approach. According to psychologists, CBT is essentially “behaviorist” because it measures the behavior of an individual to gauge that individual’s thoughts and acting. On the other hand, others attacked it as a form of social control and Newman called it as “a discourse of mediocrity, conformity and control.” He called it mediocrity because the word ‘competence’ can already be reached upon satisfaction of the minimum requirements of the work, just above the level of incompetence; conformity because trainees are compelled to accept these standards of competencies set up by the authorities to pass the course, and; control because the uniformity of implementation of these standards of competencies denies the training institutions freedom to decide and implement the level of competence applicable in each case (Newman 1994). A CBT system integrated in the VET is that with the advent of the stampede towards globalisation, there is a need for the country to adopt a revolutionary method of developing its work force to meet the exigencies of the time or be left behind. Globalisation is “the planning and conduct of economic, political and socio-cultural activity beyond one nation, extending to the whole world” (Smith & Keating 1998). Globalisation has the effect of blurring territorial boundaries as business is conducted, on a daily basis, from one country to another. Thus, there is a need for the country to undertake a parallel internationalization in all important aspects of its economic activities including the preparation of its work force. Kearns and Schofield explained: “The internationalisation of VET is a process of change whereby VET responds to the challenge of emerging international world order in all its dimensions: economic, technological, social and cultural” (Smith & Keating 1998). Australia is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world. Not only is it a melting pot of these various and different culture, both foreign and indigenous but is a large continent with distinct states and territories, an element which has caused the failure of technical education in the past. A CBT based VET not only serve as a homogenizing factor but a standardized competencies system is a means with which the national government can ensure that it meets its goals and targets with respect to its workforce capabilities in the shortest and most organized way possible. Work-Based Learning. A survey done on Victorian VET managers in 2000 that WBL is the most-favored mode of implementing VET. A similar sentiment was shared by the 1997-2000 Small Business Development Program which was funded by the Commonwealth government as well as for the 1997-98 and 1998-99 Professional Development Support Program in TAFE. However, there some sector believed that although valuable if uniformly implemented it was nevertheless not suited under certain conditions. The advantages and the disadvantages of the methodology was illustrated in the project Framing the Future, a study on the impact of VET in the 1997 using the WBL (Mitchell, Henry & John 2001). The most cogent argument however for the adoption of the WBL as a VET method is the findings of David Kolb, an American education theorist, that experiential learning theory, or the knowledge gained from experiencing an event involving the mixture of experience, perception, cognition and behavior, is a form of potent learning. Kolb’s experiential theory has the following elements: learning is best seen as a process and not as a result; it is constant due to continuity of experience; it results when conflicts are resolved; it is holistic; it involves interactions between the person and his environment, and; it is the process of creating knowledge (Mitchell, Henry & John 2001). Following the above line of reasoning by Kolb, using the WLB as an approach to the teaching of technical education guarantees that the trainees will absorb learning not only thoroughly but also faster and therefore its inclusion in the VET program is justifiable. Mumford, another theorist, who renamed the process as Action Learning process said “the Action Learning process is potentially extremely rich because it provides scope for consistently going around the Learning Cycle and discovering more about yourself, more about the process, more about how to transfer particular experiences to other situations” (qtd. Mitchell, Henry & John 2001). Unified national system. The urgency brought about by the advent of globalisation, the continuously advancing computer age, the emergence of China and India as the new super economies and their shift from low skilled manufacturing-based jobs to high skilled, the anticipated shift in Australian demographics where 2044, the ageing population will result in fewer tax-paying inhabitants, the existence of millions of unqualified adult workers within Australia who are in the risk of being left behind as fast technological advancements dictate increasing higher skills require that the national government act with haste as soon as possible to compete and remain in competition (Bardon 2006). Taking all these factors into consideration and the cogency of the situation, the Australian government therefore is justified in implementing a VET reformed system characterised by unified national system, Competency-based training and Work-based Learning implemented all throughout the states and the territories of the Commonwealth. References Bardon, Ben 2006, “Community Education and National Reform,” pp 1-2, 12 October 2008 ˂http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/A3C3E888-F668-451A-BDA6-D7264A6E5B1E/14795/CommunityEducationDiscussionPaper.pdf˃ Billett, S. & Hayes, S. 1999, 'Reform, changes and transformation: A commentary on the implementation and evolution of CBT', in The CBT Decade: Teaching for Flexibility and Adaptability, ed.S. Billett, C. McKavanagh, F. Beven, L. Angus, T. Seddon, J. Gough, S. Hayes & I. Robertson, NCVER, Leabrook, SA, pp. 15-34. Keating, Jack 1998, ‘Australian Training Reform: Implications for Schools,’ Curriculum Corporation (Australia) Published by Curriculum Corporation, p 29 Mitchell, John, & Henry, John & Young, Susan 2001,”A New Model of Workbased Learning in the VET Sector.” p 4, 13 October 2008 ˂http://www.reframingthefuture.net/docs/2003/Publications/0ALL_WBL.pdf˃ Newman, M. 1994, 'Competent forms of control', in Defining the Enemy: Adult Education in Social Action, Stewart Victor Publishing, Sydney, pp. 116-124. Smith, E. & Keating, J. 1997, 'A brief history of VET', in Making Sense of Training Reform and Competency Based Training, Social Science Press, Sydney, pp. 7-15. Smith, E. & Keating, J. 1997, ‘Making Sense of Training Reform and Competency Based Training,’ Social Science Press, Sydney, pp. 48-52, 176-180. Read More