Editorial

How to frame the design and delivery of vocational education and training (VET) is a contentious issue. In Australia, it used to be in terms of State curricula, then national curricula which in the early 1990s were expressed in terms of competency standards, and then from around 1997 embodied as competencies within national training packages. The Germanic nations employ the dual system, which many other countries have tried to adapt to their own national contexts with varying degrees of success. For as Deissinger (2015, 607-8) asserts, ‘it is culture which underlies both the practice and the theory as well as the policy of VET’, the ‘particular historical developments and specific cultural and pedagogical convictions’ rather than institutions and steering mechanisms; and in Germany the notion of beruf implies a holistic competence portfolio as distinct from the functionalist interpretations of training and qualifications of many other nations, particularly Anglo-Saxon ones. England has had its own versions of competency standards, while Scotland and New Zealand have used unit standards. Now New Zealand is trying a new approach for its VET qualifications – moving from competency-based outcomes to graduate outcome profiles.

Selena Chan in the first article analyses New Zealand’s shift ‘to advance qualifications beyond competency-based outcomes, and express qualification outcomes in the form of graduate profiles’. The intention is that qualifications, instead of being written as prescribed competency unit standards, be expressed in more holistic graduate outcome profile terms, and in so doing, acknowledge more adequately the complex nature of graduate or occupational identities as well as indicating pathways onto education and employment. In her paper she interprets the shift as being from the realist to the relational perspective towards framing qualifications, using Holme’s (2013) concepts of graduate outcomes being realistic or relational to structure her discussion. Selena discusses the implications for New Zealand vocational education curriculum, and makes recommendations for the deployment of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment approaches supporting graduate-outcome, national qualifications. As she concludes, it will be important to follow the evolution and impact of the changes in this shift of the New Zealand Qualifications Framework to graduate outcome profiles.

Turning from design to delivery, we note that learner engagement is currently a very popular phrase. It was first identified in the mid-1990s as ‘the latest buzzword in education circles’ (Kenny, Kenny & Dumont, 1995). It is challenging to define as it is a complex construct influenced by multiple factors. Some of these factors that influence student engagement can be related to: teachers, institutions, the learners themselves, family and community factors, and curricula and resources (Victoria State Government, 2014). The term is often used to describe learners’ willingness to participate in educational activities, though it is also increasingly used to depict meaningful student involvement throughout the learning environment, having the functional skills to participate meaningfully, being competent as a learner and problem-solver, and having a sense of meaning. Learner engagement, in fact, is increasingly seen as an indicator of successful instruction and as a valued outcome of school reform (Edufena, 2014).

The next three articles focus on how to engage different types of VET learners – disadvantaged older jobseekers, increasingly diverse cohorts especially those requiring language, literacy and numeracy (LLN) support, and international students. Rebecca Myers highlights the barriers faced by older adults which include institutional, societal and personal factors that may constrain their participation in training and educational activities to increase their employability. This is despite any policy for viewing increases in the labour force participation rate of older adults (45-64 years) as a primary strategy to address current demographic challenges brought about by an ageing population and the retirement of skilled workers. From a qualitative, phenomenological study involving semi-structured interviews, Rebecca analyses the experiences of a small group of disadvantaged older job-seekers as they participated in training and job-seeking activities. She concludes that there is a disparity between participants’ preferred ways of learning and the delivery modes in their training programs, and that as a result their training activities did not necessarily translate into employment. Her findings call into question the value of training and the effectiveness of current provision.

Within the marketised VET environment of today, Cheryl Livock addresses how LLN and inclusive teaching practices might be effectively delivered to engage increasingly diverse student cohorts and how ongoing learning support needs to be funded adequately and provided flexibly for continued learner engagement. She portrays the context of her study as ‘walking the tightrope between social responsibility and market forces’. Using action research at two, public provider sites in Brisbane with teachers of and students in the Diploma of Nursing, Cheryl demonstrates how ongoing, face-to-face learning support was an important contributor to the students’ success, and yet funding cuts to the entire VET sector in Queensland have bitten deeply into staffing levels. Her action research sheds light on the positive impact of support services, but also on how the Foundation Skills Training Package can be utilised cost effectively to improve student outcomes, with vocational and support teachers working more collaboratively to improve student experience and engagement.

The paper by Sonal Nakar identifies seven dilemmas that VET teachers face in teaching international students. Her qualitative research involved in-depth interviews with 15 VET teachers from several Australian public and private VET institutions. The dilemmas the teachers experienced were categorized as professional, educational and personal, and arose from ethical tensions they faced in their interactions with international students, teaching colleagues and their employing institutions. These dilemmas were created by the tensions pulling VET teachers between serving students’ best interests while adhering to government reforms and organizational policies on the one hand, and acting in their own professional interests and personal well-being on the other. Sonal teases out the implications of each of these dilemmas, and then discusses how they are often interconnected and impact on each other. Her findings provide evidence for ongoing review and development of student enrolment and teacher employment in the culturally-diverse VET sector, and have implications for the goals of educational equity and quality learning experiences and outcomes.

Some of the earlier papers in this issue refer to the marketised VET environment as the context in which their research had been undertaken. In Australia, the marketisation of vocational education began in Victoria in 2009, and spread to the other States. It led to significant national changes in purchasing arrangements and created transformational change. The reactions to these changes have been varied in strength and nature. Williams (2011) claimed that ‘it is very much … about marketisation with little emphasis on education policy and quality outcomes …, not well informed, rather it is driven by a dogma that has not been clearly thought out, properly planned and certainly not properly implemented’. On the other hand, Bowman and McKenna (2016) take a more favourable view in stating that ‘Australia’s integrated model of national skills standards and the national framework for awarding qualifications is a major strength of its VET system’. However, they do also acknowledge the failures as well as the successes of the varying student entitlement reforms. Critically, they claim, the differing models applied in the implementation of the student training entitlement reform have each ‘coincided with reforms that have required public providers to operate in an environment of greater competition, and it is this that has been the trigger for much of the resulting disruption’.

The final two papers examine aspects of this marketised VET environment. Quite evidently, achieving better measures of efficiency is vital in the Australian context, where increasingly tight budgets have led governments to examine closely this very complex issue. Peter Fieger, Renato Villano and Ray Cooksey focus on how efficiency in public VET institutes can be defined and measured. In their study, the authors employed parametric Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) to determine the efficiency of Australian public VET institutes, defining efficiency as the relationship between financial and administrative inputs and educational outputs. They drew on data from institutional annual reports, the national Student Outcomes Survey conducted by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research, and administrative databases. Their analysis revealed some clear inefficiencies. These were mainly related to the degree of remoteness, institutional load pass rate and proportions of disabled students, apprentices and trainees, or students enrolled in courses of Certificate III or higher. They also found significant economies-of-scale effects in the Australian public VET system, which diminish once institutions exceed a certain minimum threshold in size. This finding may have value for policy-making decisions dealing with the restructuring of institutes that are not rural. In relation to method, they conclude that Stochastic Frontier Analysis represents a valuable and alternative tool for the estimation of efficiency in educational institutions.

The last paper by Waheed Asghar, Iftkhar Hussain Shah and Naeem Akhtar addresses the hotly-debated issue of costs and benefits for employers involved in apprenticeship training. They contend that the international literature on this issue is fragmented, scattered and incomplete, and therefore set out to synthesise what is known about the importance of apprenticeship training in developing human capital, and to identify constructs for analysing return on investment in terms of the impact of training on firm productivity, profitability and long-term competitiveness. Their context is dual apprenticeship training in Pakistan, though their analysis has far wider relevance. The paper details the various forms of apprenticeship costs as well as benefits for employers. The authors conclude that a cost-benefit analysis of apprenticeship training that is based on wages and productivity tells only half the story; a more inclusive and accurate depiction can be made when short- and long-term benefits are included. Moreover, a more valid picture of cost-benefit can be drawn when benefits for other stakeholders than industry alone, like apprentices, society and nation, are taken into account.

Enjoy reading this first issue for 2016.

Roger Harris
Adjunct Professor, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Berwyn Clayton
Professor Emerita, Victoria University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia