vocational education and training (VET) Archives

We want experts to be VET teachers. Here’s what happens next

This is the third in a series of posts on AARE’s education priorities for the 2025 federal election. Today’s posts are about boosting the teacher workforce.

Vocational education and training (VET) is a large and important education sector in Australia. VET supports the learning of a significant number of Australians, with 5.1 million enrolments in 2023. Our economy is transforming rapidly, impacting the knowledge and skills needed by the Australian workforce. VET is the educational powerhouse that supplies the bulk of these needs. The importance of VET cannot be denied, but there is a problem: it is getting harder to recruit teachers. Despite some commentary to the contrary, the overwhelming evidence is that across the sector, providers are finding it difficult to secure and retain teachers.

There are multiple factors in play in the VET teacher supply challenge. One is that VET teaching often pays less than what could be earned in industry. Given cost of living pressures, this is a significant factor in the supply problem. Another is that the nature of the sector requires varying kinds of teacher, from industry experts doing ad hoc teaching and assessment through to career teachers in various modes of employment. The diversity of VET teaching roles means that any response to the supply challenge must be nuanced.

Too much for some, too little for others

The diversity of roles also means the current entry-level qualification – a level 4 Certificate – is too basic for dedicated VET teachers. At the same time too involved for industry people on brief teaching stints. As a result, the qualification to become a VET teacher is a long-standing sore point for the system that undermines teacher satisfaction and system quality, while creating a barrier for some types of teacher.

A more subtle factor in the teacher supply challenge is that the VET system uses an approach to course design that sidelines and can even conflict with teachers’ industry expertise. VET teachers need substantial industry expertise. For instance, if I learn hairdressing, then it can only be from someone who is or was a hairdresser. And system rules require teachers who are not currently practising in industry to maintain their links with and currency. These rules mean VET teachers are always industry experts.

However, when an industry expert opts to become a VET teacher, they are obliged to base their educational work on standardised descriptions of industry tasks and roles. These descriptions (called ‘competencies’ in the system) guide resource production and lesson planning. The competencies are a good idea in principle. The reality is they follow a format not natural to many industry experts and may become outdated quickly.

The problem of unnatural format is important because industry expertise is always quite specific, whereas the format for the statements is one-size-fits-all across everything from creative industries to electrotechnology to enrolled nursing. As a result, the many nuances of industry skills and knowledge are not always communicated adequately in the documents. It makes industry experts teaching from them uncomfortable.

The rates of change pose a real problem

The second problem is becoming a big issue in VET because the rate of change in some industries is outpacing the process for writing the competencies. Research suggests that some of these statements can be out of date by the time they are released, while others are only current for a short time. Teachers are put in a difficult position when faced with out-of-date information. The rules of the system say they must teach exactly what is in the statements, but teachers cannot in good conscience teach what is no longer industry practice.

The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations is responsible for the VET sector and over the last few years has undertaken a VET Qualification Reform process intended to tackle these and other issues. A new era is promised that may lead to a system that allows for rich design principles and curricula. But VET teachers must be central to the creation and maintenance of such a system.

Regardless of which party or parties come to power this election, the reform process must be followed through to the point where teachers given scope to put their expertise to good use. In this way, a declining workforce can be invigorated. Honouring the desire in teachers to advance their industries and pass on quality practices is something that could help everyone linked to the VET system – and that really is everyone!

Steven Hodge is Director of the Griffith Institute for Educational Research (GIER), a large, multidisciplinary community of education researchers. Steven’s research focuses on the relationship between curriculum development and the work of educators. Much of his empirical research has been in the areas of adult and vocational education, concerned with how occupational knowledge and skills are represented in curriculum and how that curriculum is translated for learning.

Working future: Now, how to build a bridge

The Federal Government’s white paper Working Future argues for closer cooperation between vocational education and training (VET) and higher education (HE). The goal is a seamless array of lifelong education opportunities for Australians.

Here’s the problem. VET and HE don’t always work well together, prompting commentators to characterise the Australian tertiary sector as a ‘binary’. But that’s not my only concern – the white paper reflects a degree of amnesia about the history of the sector. The silos of VET and HE are largely creations of government policy over several decades.

The call for a more effective tertiary sector runs up against a complex of differences: dimensions of curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, teacher preparation, regulation, funding and marketisation. These individual differences have sprung from government policy, even in relation to fundamentally educational categories.

One of these differences stands out as fundamental for both educators and policy makers. Curriculum is fundamental because it expresses the meaning of educational intentions and experience. In the context of Australian tertiary education and its problematic binary structure, the importance of curriculum is amplified.

On one side of the tertiary binary, a single curriculum model has been successfully imposed on providers and teachers while the other side has managed to avoid it. On the VET side, ‘competency-based training’ (CBT) was implemented as a system-wide model for all government-funded provision. Its justification was economic and social. In the 1980s, the Labour Government initiated sweeping reforms to reposition Australia as a global economic competitor across its portfolios, including VET. Higher education was targeted too, but it effectively resisted imposition of a CBT approach.

The upshot was that HE was left to follow its own lights in regard to curriculum. Of course, there are broad structures that impinge on curriculum in HE, such as the Australian Qualifications Framework, but their level of prescription is modest, at least in terms of implications for actual curriculum.

The lack of centralised control over HE curriculum turned out to be a boon for that side of the tertiary sector. It means HE providers can exercise maximum creativity in relation to curriculum, and rest on the expertise and insight of their teachers and researchers to craft learning experiences that directly reflect the requirements of disciplines, study areas and professions with a stake in HE.

Even where standards are produced by professional associations and tied to program accreditation, HE providers have latitude to meet those standards in unique and innovative ways and the conceptualisation of standards is specific to the industry involved (rather than a generic model like CBT).

It is worth pointing out that if professional standards become too prescriptive then curriculum quality suffers and teachers may become alienated.

That is precisely what has happened in VET. CBT can be regarded as a highly prescriptive implementation of standards relating to industries served by that system. Instead of high-level expressions of essential capabilities such as those prepared by Engineers Australia and used in HE engineering programs, competency standards in VET are intricately detailed and include very specific requirements about what knowledge and skills are supposed to underpin competent performances and how those performances should be assessed.

The curricular impact of adherence to such standards is hard to overstate. It is possible to imagine that very uninformed providers and teachers might benefit from that level of prescription, but for the bulk of educators in VET the imposition is frustrating and even demoralising. As such, the quality of the whole system may be compromised through overprescription of industry standards.

But it takes educational expertise to untangle many of these issues. At the level of policy making, high levels of prescription may be reassuring. Policy makers may find it difficult to trace ramifications for curriculum innovation and quality.

From a curriculum angle, an effective tertiary sector in Australia would require stepping back and considering how to find a productive balance between industry or professional standards on the one hand, and curriculum innovation on the other.

Critical here is the level of prescription attached to standards. Those representing industries and professions should leave educational decisions to those with educational expertise. As the VET experience demonstrates, it is easy for industry representatives to stray into the realm of curriculum decision-making and thereby impose constraints on educational innovation and quality that in turn undermine provider and teacher expertise and motivation.

A more effective tertiary sector would be one where great care is taken to promote curricular creativity across both VET and HE. Winding back the curricular constraints implicit in the Australian implementation of CBT in VET is one way to address the binary of our tertiary sector. At the same time, those who work in HE should remain vigilant. It is not hard to imagine a scenario in which standards for an area like Initial Teacher Education (ITE) become politicised and from there become more prescriptive and exert stronger influence over actual curriculum in ITE degrees. In a scenario like that, the quandary in which expert and caring educators in VET find themselves could become a reality for education academics responsible for ITE.

This Blog is based in part on a recent MCERA Webinar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsQKX6SoReU) and on a paper by Hodge, Guthrie, Jones and Waters currently under review. Contact Steven Hodge (s.hodge@griffith.edu.au) for a copy of the draft.

Steven Hodge is a member of the Griffith Institute for Educational Research (GIER) and of the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, where he is Director of the Master of Education and Graduate Certificate in Professional Learning programs. He is immediate past president of the Australasian Vocational Education and Training Association and key contributor to debate in Australian post-compulsory education.