Abstract:
In recent years there has been growing concern regarding the quality of vocational education and training (VET) and the VET sector’s ability to produce the quality of graduates needed for industry. Although quality regulators have exposed examples of fraudulent and questionable practices, there is ongoing cause for concern as opportunistic providers (Education and Employment Reference Committee, 2015), poor-quality provision (Guthrie et al., 2014), and low-quality markets (Toner, 2014) continue to undermine efforts to raise standards. Little is known about how poor-quality provision is affecting the teaching and learning of trade vocations, nor the quality and calibre of tradespeople graduating from the sector. This presentation provides an overview of a Victoria-wide PhD study investigating how changes to the VET sector post national training reform have affected the quality of VET provision available for metal engineering (mechanical and fabrication) tradespeople and apprentices from the perspectives of experienced metal engineering trade teachers. It asks the question, How have changes to trade training impacted the quality of education available to engineering trade apprentices and tradespeople in Victoria? This mixed-methods study recruited experienced and veteran engineering trade teachers from around Victoria, incorporating in-depth interviews (n=17), focus groups (n=23), and a survey/questionnaire (n=25). It employed thematic coding, narrative analysis, and initially draws on labour process theory and the concept of alienation (Marx, 1964). The findings reveal the suppressed trade teacher narrative of quality-as-trade-excellence, and discloses many ways in which the quality and content of engineering trade education is narrowing, and how the apprenticeship experience is thinning in response to the changing VET landscape. The findings further reveal that engineering trade teachers are: estranged from informing the frameworks that determine how their trade is passed on; alienated from the products of their labour (i.e. quality of trade graduates); alienated from their creative free life activity (i.e. species being); and restricted from passing on of the full sociocultural value of their trade vocations to their students/apprentices. Engineering trade teachers are likely to associate quality trade provision as vocational education designed to equip trade students/apprentices with skills and knowledge that is ‘broad, enduring and flexible’— a concept of quality education encompassing holistic (instead of fragmented) notions of trade competence. ReferencesEducation and Employment Reference Committee. (2015). Getting our money's worth: the operation, regulation and funding of private vocational education and training (VET) providers in Australia: Commonwealth Government. Guthrie, H., Smith, E., Burt, S., & Every, P. (2014). Review of the effects of funding approaches on service skills qualifications and delivery in Victoria. Melbourne: Service Skills Victoria. Marx, K. (1964). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. New York: International Publishers.Toner, P. (2014). Contracting out publicly funded vocational education: a transaction cost critique. Economic and Labour Relations Review, 25(2), 222-239.