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VISION FOR THE FUTURE-VET
AISV Building Partnerships
in VETNewsletter, 2002
Dr David Warner
Principal/CEO, ELTHAM College of Education.
VET is an imperative not an option.
For too many years VET has been seen as an option, an alternative or an
add-on. Its inception came years ago as part of a move to make school
retention into the senior years more attractive for students for whom
the traditional academic pathway was not a realistic option. It was
first seriously implemented with modified pre-vocational courses in
Queensland in 1986 with the opening of the first Senior College.
Pathways education started to become a significant issue in senior
schooling and some States discussed convergence. However, vocational
study faced enormous difficulties in obtaining status with the
traditional academic courses. Serious opposition came from teachers,
teacher unions and schools who had very focused views on the purpose of
senior schooling. It was, and indeed in some circles still is, regarded
as a lesser option and largely for young people who would struggle to
succeed in university directed academic courses.
Despite the changes over the past fifteen years in the status of TAFE
(vocational education and training in the public sector), employment
credibility, cross-credits between TAFE and University and evidence of
the success of the TAFE-University and University-TAFE pathways, many
schools, teachers, students and parents regard it with a considerable
degree of disparagement. In fact, this is witnessed in Victoria’s
decision to develop a VCE vocational alternative certificate, VCAL,
rather than broaden the VCE to recognise the talents and achievements of
all students. It has been extremely challenging to change the tradition
of a liberal academic education for all, despite the fact that it was
designed for an era in which only the academically bright or reasonably
bright but well-off, completed secondary school. Today only 30-40% of
school students go onto university (with some 30-40% of these not
completing their courses). Even so, the university pathway is
acknowledged as superior. Simply read the media VCE scorecards and sum
the difference between academic units and VET units and you will get the
message!
VET today, therefore, is viewed still as a subject or course
alternative, option or add-on and in rare cases as a realistic
alternative pathway. We still argue lowering of standards, diverting
resources and only for the non-academic. I say this with apologies to
those few schools that see VET as an integral component of the
curriculum.
However, what of the future?
To gain some sense of the future we need to move beyond seeing VET as an
alternative for some students to encourage them to remain at school and
gain some credible recognition. We have to ask ourselves what is
vocational education within school and move beyond simply equating it
with a narrow view of training. VET in schools introduces young people
to critical knowledge about and skill for the labour market and can
create greater opportunities for all students. We have to ask ourselves
whether the key learning skills (critical thinking, problem solving,
communication, self-direction, accessing and using information, concept
formation, analysis and evaluation, self-reflection) can be developed
through vocational education or whether they belong only to the
traditional academic disciplines. We have to ask ourselves whether
rigour and high standards are part of vocational education. We also can
ask some simple questions about the purpose of schooling, learning
styles, student motivation and how people learn to learn. We might then
actually value applied learning as a valuable tool for learning to
conceptualise and learning to learn.
However, we need to go beyond this to speculate about the future. For at
least ten years we have witnessed a massive transformation in the global
labour market, and no change has been more drastic than that confronting
young people. Not only do they face a world in which learning has to be
life-long, but their immediate post-school world will involve concurrent
work and learning. Their first full-time job will not really come until
they are in their mid-to late twenties. They will face a post-school
world in which casual and part-time work is the norm, in fact, it is now
more the post-compulsory world rather than the post-school as many
senior students are working and going to school at the same time. The
labour market is directed largely to knowledge work or service work.
Realistically, many young people will be engaged in both job markets.
A key word for the future will be convergence. We will see the
convergence of academic and vocational curriculum and all students will
be engaged in both. The additional element will be the pressure from the
labour market for young people to engage in more work and work-based
training as the effects of the decline in the 0-25 population take hold.
This work will be service, traditional trade and knowledge work, as with
the latter, fifteen year olds will be in increasing demand in areas such
as multi-media and IT.
The ageing labour market also will increasingly affect the post-school
providers, particularly TAFE. TAFE will move much more into work-force
training as the demand for new skills increases. This will open up
greater opportunity and need for schools to be involved in entry-level
and service industry training. In addition, post-school fees will
increase the need for university students to be engaged in casual and
part-time work. Work and post-school study will be the norm and
university destined senior school students will engage in vocational
studies, both to better understand the labour market they will be in and
to gain employment competencies to be competitive in the labour market.
Having argued this situation, I also recognize that the move to a
greater focus on vocational education will be resisted for a while. Both
schools and traditional subject teachers will resist change and mount
the age-old arguments about standards and rigour. However, as the
population decline in the 0-18 market bites and the need to be involved
in employment with study increases, parents will look for schools that
provide the opportunities and change will be forced on the resistors.
To conclude, vocational education in senior schooling will converge with
the academic. The changing labour market and the increased coupling of
study and work will also help give vocational education VCE credibility.
Vocational education will expand into more non-traditional areas,
particularly applied knowledge work. People, including the VCE/ENTER
score focused Victorian media, will recognize it for its creativity,
rigour and capacity to develop the disposition and skill for life-long
learning.
June 2003
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Video presentation by Dr. David Warner