VET teacher education in Australian universities: who are the students and what are their views about their courses?

Abstract

In Australia, the question of the level and nature of qualifications for vocational education and training (VET) teachers is a highly contested and political topic. VET teachers are only required to have a pre-university, certificate level pedagogical qualification, the Certificate IV in Training and Assessment. They possess substantially lower-level qualifications than teachers in other education sectors, although this was not always the case. The paper reports on research which investigated the experiences of VET teacher-education students studying for university qualifications. The research was undertaken in response to requests from policy stakeholders for evidence about the efficacy of higher-level qualifications. The research indicated student satisfaction with their courses and an alignment between what they saw as the benefits with the identified challenges of VET teaching. They also suggested areas for improvement. The findings are analysed with relation to the findings of a Productivity Commission inquiry into the VET workforce, which identified a number of capability gaps.

Keywords:

• VET teacher qualifications
• VET teaching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Productivity Commission is the Australian Government’s independent research and policy advisory body.

2. The AQTF (Australian Quality Training Framework) was at that time the quality framework for VET.