Problems of a Market Model of VET: What can we learn from the UK and Australian experiences?

This article is written by Paul Hager, Emeritus Professor, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and was developed from conversations I had with Paul on the Reimagining FE conference at Birmingham City University on 29^th June, 2016.

It is with great pleasure that I would like to share Paul’s work with an English FE audience:

This brief article describes how the recent applications of neo-liberal economic policies to vocational education and training (VET) in the UK and Australia have undermined aspirations to achieve world-class skills formation systems. Since the two VET systems have many commonalties each can learn from the other’s recent less than optimal experiences. The article concludes by proposing how VET in both nations might be strengthened through the adoption of a richer, research-based model.

In both the UK and Australia formal, government-controlled VET systems arose in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Since then the story of VET has been broadly similar in the two nations. Initially VET endured a long period as the impoverished Cinderella of the formal education system. Then followed a golden era of expansion and increased funding. This included the implementation of professional VET teacher qualifications. However, from the late 1980s onwards the fortunes of VET in both nations have continued to decline significantly. Misguided efforts by successive governments to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of VET in the name of greatly improved skills development have instead led to opposite outcomes. Government operated VET (called Further Education in the UK and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Australia) has been significantly run down, whilst at the same time public funding has increasingly been diverted to subsidising unprecedented growth of private VET provision.

The marked impoverishment of skill formation arrangements since the late 1980s can be traced directly to the unforeseen consequences of two major policy mechanisms that have underpinned the revamping of VET: the adoption of competency-based training (CBT) and the growing privatisation of VET.

CBT was the centre-piece of the reforms to VET from the late 1980s onwards. The plan was for all VET courses, whether offered by public or private provision, to conform to the CBT model. This initiative was widely supported at the time by diverse stakeholders because it was claimed to ensure better alignment between VET course content and the skills desired by industry and employers. As well at the time there was a perception that CBT would enable the kind of economic success enjoyed by the Scandinavian countries. Unfortunately for both the UK and Australia, the particular form of CBT that was adopted centred on a very narrow understanding of competence, one that assumed that the practice of an occupation is reducible to a set of discrete competencies. The guiding assumption that quickly came to dominate much CBT implementation was that once trainees had demonstrated satisfactory performance of each of the discrete competencies, they were to be deemed to be competent practitioners. It became common for assessment of competence to involve mere ticking off of a checklist of the discrete competencies.

However, this approach to judging competence is invalid. It represents skilled performance in an overly simplistic way. Competent performance of an occupation is one of those cases where the sum of the discrete parts does not in itself constitute the whole. Any convincing account of skilled performance also requires a degree of holism, as the following everyday example illustrates. Consider what is necessary for skilled driving of a motor vehicle. We can easily identify a set of discrete skills (starting the ignition, making a 90 degree right turn, applying the foot brake, etc). Suppose that we had identified a complete list of motor vehicle driving skills, (say sixty of them). Suppose further that a learner demonstrated that they could perform each of these sixty discrete skills. Would it follow that we should certify them as a skilled driver? Clearly not – skillful driving involves more than being adept at each of these discrete skills. There is no contradiction in the claim that someone is adept at each of these discrete skills, yet is still a very poor driver. Skillful driving involves something more; the capacity to enact a holistic driving performance that matches the particular road and traffic conditions and many other circumstances that obtain at a particular time. So the real skill of driving resides not so much in having the discrete skills as in the capacity to put them together in effective combinations that meet present conditions. This holistic capacity is underpinned by less tangible ‘competencies’ such as perceptual discrimination, persistence, attention to detail, planning ahead, judgement, etc.

Thus, genuine competence incorporates a vital holistic dimension that eludes CBT checklists. No doubt there have been many able VET teachers who understood these matters from the start of the CBT era and incorporated them into their teaching, whilst at the same time paying lip service to the prescribed CBT framework. Nevertheless, in both the UK and Australia the CBT system has served to entrench widely the belief that the flawed CBT checklist approach represents a sound vocational preparation.

However, things soon got worse. The defects of the CBT approach have only been amplified since the 1990s by the second major policy mechanism of greatly expanding the privatisation of VET. Subsidising private providers to take a much bigger share of VET courses has in effect rewarded those most inclined and motivated to adopt the most threadbare interpretations of CBT. Doubtless there are private VET providers who are motivated to deliver quality courses, but they are also constrained by the need to ensure a profit. As governments have increasingly allocated VET funds via competitive tendering between public and private providers, the pressure to resort to minimalist CBT has only intensified. Whilst the bid documents are sure to have emphasised the quality of the proposed training, the reality, especially for private providers, is the need to restrict training to the quantum available once the profit margin bas been deducted from the restricted funding provided. In such an environment, even providers motivated by strong educational considerations have been squeezed into lowering their aspirations. Thus the two major policy mechanisms have interacted to deliver widespread low quality training.

At the same time governments in Australia and UK have greatly increased the cost of VET qualifications and instituted a system of repayable loans to encourage student demand. In Australia in particular, this has led to a flood of unethical and fraudulent activities in the VET sector. The last year alone has seen a growing number of large private VET providers going into receivership after having absorbed significant public funds, yet leaving their students without the contracted training. There have been many instances of unethical and fraudulent student recruitment practices, for example using the inducement of a ‘free’ laptop to pressure naïve would be students to sign up for a course whilst incurring an accompanying large debt. There have also been many instances of poor training or even non-existent training. Whole cohorts of ‘graduates’ have had their qualifications revoked, as the flimsiness of the training that they received has come to light. Courses supposed to have been delivered by on-the job training have turned out to involve minimal training, with the trainees instead being used as cheap labour.

All of these failings are highly predictable in a system that encourages would-be entrepreneurs to set up private colleges, not from any commitment to skills formation, but rather to gain their share of the VET ‘cash cow’. In short, using the profit motive to drive VET provision has proved to be very dubious in relation to the laudable aim of achieving high quality skills formation.

Is there a more sustainable and robust model for VET?

The last twenty years have seen significant research work on workplace learning and professional practice. Perhaps the major principle established by this research is that proficient performance in occupations that are even moderately complex involves seamless know how, the development of which requires significant workplace experience. This means that highly skilled performance cannot be produced by formal education alone. This is so because the nature of practice-based know how is that it is often imprecise, implicit in character and contextualized. It is therefore very difficult – in some cases quite impossible – to explain it in abstract, theoretical terms. As well, for many occupations in recent decades, changes in technology and advances in knowledge have outstripped the capacity of formal courses to keep up-to-date. This has meant that ongoing learning, much of it from actual practice, is needed even by experienced practitioners simply to maintain their proficiency. The moral of these findings is that workplace know how, i.e. the capacity to make sound occupational judgements, is always in the making. It is an ongoing process.

What does this suggest for contemporary VET systems? Firstly, completion of a vocational preparation course should be presented as starting novices on an ongoing learning journey, not as achieving fully-fledged competence. The major purpose of VET should be to assist students to embark on a fruitful learning trajectory. The importance of occupational know how, or professional judgement, as an ongoing work-in-progress should be a standard focal point of VET curricula. Unfortunately the rising costs of VET courses, together with the growing trend for students to be bound by repayable loans, only encourages providers to ‘sell’ their products as gold-plated guarantees of competence.

Whilst it is desirable that VET courses include learning experiences that approximate real workplace conditions, they cannot fully replicate the specifics of actual workplace situations. However, where possible links between VET course experiences and workplace conditions should be fostered.

The above points may appear familiar as they are broadly consistent with how well-structured and delivered apprenticeships have traditionally operated. But they are less in accord with the many kinds of more academic, classroom-based, course delivery patterns that have emerged as VET has expanded over the last century.

Also, a richer understanding of competence is possible and viable. Since the 1990s most Australian professions have also adopted a competence system, but one that is very different from CBT – one that might be called ‘competence-informed professional education’. Here the competence statements, which attempt a rich description of key aspects of professional practice, are employed holistically. This plays out in several distinctive ways. One is that any slice of actual professional practice will simultaneously involve several of these key aspects. Thus assessment activities must focus on selected slices of actual practice, rather than on the key aspects of professional practice taken one by one. Another is that the competency statements are not to be confused with a curriculum, as too often happens in CBT. Further, it is stressed that professional practice is a whole that cannot be captured comprehensively in the competency statements. For example, competency statements cannot account for crucial tacit aspects of practice. Nevertheless this integrated competency approach has proved to be a very useful tool for enriching understanding of the holistic nature of actual practice situations. It provides very useful input into a variety of activities for which professional boards and associations are responsible, such as judging applications to practice from prospective migrants, accrediting tertiary courses, designing refresher courses for professionals returning to practice after years of absence, and so on. Not surprisingly, this more holistic approach to professional competence accords closely with how competence has been understood in Nordic and Middle European VET systems.

All in all, skills development in the UK and Australia has a very long way to go if it is ever to approach the best international standards such as those that obtain in Germany. 

Paul Hager, Emeritus Professor, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia