Insights
TAFE as distinctively public tertiary education institutions
Author: Gavin Moodie is principal policy adviser at RMIT. His book 'From vocational to higher education: an international perspective' was published by McGraw-Hill.*
LH Martin Institute Associate Professor Leesa Wheelahan has been very busy this last year responding to requests to present keynotes and lead seminars on what many conference organisers call the implications of Bradley for VET. The Bradley review was of higher education, but it is a hot topic in vocational education and training for two reasons.
The State and Australian governments’ steady erosion of their financial support for and the educational value of vocational education since 1992 has left vocational institutions with little scope for developing their own sector. Expanding into higher education is potentially educationally and financially rewarding for vocational institutes. In this, Australian vocational institutes are following their analogues in Aotearoa New Zealand, British Columbia, South Africa, the UK and the US.
Secondly, vocational education has not had a comprehensive national review since the first and only such review in 1974 by the Australian committee on technical and further education chaired by Myer Kangan. Australian vocational education risked a period of what Gareth Parry calls ‘low policy’ in describing English further education from 1987 to 1997. (Parry, England’s leading scholar on links between further and higher education, will present a paper on higher education franchising for the LH Martin Institute on 8 October this year.) Australian vocational education has adopted the Bradley review and the government’s response Transforming Australia’s higher education system as if it were about transforming Australia’s tertiary education to fill the evident gap in a comprehensive national policy for vocational education.
Surely the Coalition will follow Bradley and make student entitlements available at all registered higher education providers, and indeed this may be done by Labor. While current universities may want to delay this, which may not be a good strategy. In 1975 the directors of the central institutes of technology formed a group (revived in 1999 as the Australian technology network) to argue for recognition as senior institutions of vocational higher education. Had universities accepted and the Williams committee of inquiry into education and training recommended that the DOCIT colleges be recognised as a separate sector in 1979, the ‘Dawkins revolution’ of higher education in 1988 would have been substantially different.
So maybe the better approach is to plan for the extension of student entitlements to all higher education providers. TAFE institutes should have a special place in such a scheme as public providers of tertiary education, distinctively alternate to the current public providers of higher education - all but one of which are universities. For as Leesa and colleagues argued in their report last year on higher education in TAFE for the National Centre for Vocational Education Research, it is most inequitable that students from non-traditional backgrounds who are most likely to attend non-traditional higher education institutions, are required to pay full tuition fees, while the students from high and upper middle socioeconomic status backgrounds who are most likely to attend universities are offered places heavily subsidised by the Australian Government. TAFE institutes should have access to places supported by the Australian Government, which in the current policy means they should participate in the higher education student entitlement system.
- Appeared in the LH Martin Institute July Newsletter.
* The views expressed in 'Insights' belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of LH Martin Institute.
Insights is a new monthly feature in the LH Martin Institute Newsletter, which includes contributed opinion pieces written by leaders and experts across the tertiary education sector. Read other Insight articles.