Vocational Education and Training has been the poor cousin of Australia’s tertiary sector – literally and figuratively – for a long time and Australia’s TAFE leader has now asked if it is time to wave goodbye to VET.
TAFE Directors Australia CEO Jenny Dodd said VET had been used as a catch-all to describe all non-university training for decades, but the term entrenched an issue of people conflating vocational education with training.
“The perpetuation of using the term VET to mean upskilling in compliance training, while still being the same term used for Australian critical industry qualification delivery, fails to position the vocational education market appropriately,” Ms Dodd said in a recent update to members.
VET had long been poorly understood and the renewed focus on understanding and defining the roles and relationship between vocational and higher education to deliver the Accord’s goal of tertiary sector harmonisation had again exposed misunderstandings of what TAFEs and other vocational educators delivered, she said.
“If we were to more deliberately use “vocational education” perhaps that would help move toward the much desired ‘parity of esteem’ that we seek with higher education. By using “vocational education”, we would focus on the skills and knowledge and applied skills and knowledge that are developed through longer engagement with practical learning that distinguishes vocational from higher education.
“Training then becomes a valuable term itself. Training would be used to mean the short compliance courses that are so very important for the upskilling of existing workers as well as for entry level competencies that often are necessary for that first job.”
Whether HE, VE and T catch on as distinct and well-defined elements within the tertiary sector remain to be seen – but with the well-regarded Ms Dodd on the case, it’s surely only a matter of time before it makes its way to Jason Clare’s speechwriter.
We can hear the new speech coming along now, ready to be polished up for next February's Universities Australia Summit speech. “When I was growing up in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, collecting trollies in the car park of woollies, I couldn’t imagine I was going to preside over a system that found a way to ignore domestic student fees and regulate not just Vice-Chancellor’s pay and international student numbers, but also three distinct areas of the tertiary sector: Higher Education, which has lost its way with the shonks but is being brought back on track by ATEC, TEQSA, new Ombudspersons, the Department and me. Then there is Vocational Education, which we call TAFE, which has been given new life through Fee Free TAFE and is regulated by ASQA, ATEC, the Department and me. And finally, we also have the Training sector, which we have only just realised existed and so we will create some new entities to provide regulation as quickly as possible, before the shonks take over. Did I mention I was first in my family to go to university? It was a lot cheaper then. No one had even heard of JRG. Luckily no-one outside universities seems to have heard of it either, so we can keep on regulating to our heart’s content.”