Competency-based VET 'a disaster': Leesa Wheelahan
JOHN ROSS, Higher Education Reporter, THE AUSTRALIAN 8th March 2017
Competency-based training needs to be discarded, along with the training packages it is based around, vocational education researcher Leesa Wheelahan has declared.
In a rare visit to her homeland, the Toronto-based researcher said CBT — the bedrock approach to Australian vocational education for two decades — had demonstrably failed in its three objectives of making qualifications more mobile, aligning training with occupations and overcoming a 1980s mistrust of public institutions.
Dr Wheelahan has also called for a comprehensive inquiry into vocational education and training, saying a dozen or so “bitsy” reviews over the past three years have failed to resolve a crisis in VET.
She said the crisis was epitomised by rorts and regulatory crackdowns, plummeting TAFE market share and a collapse in VET resourcing — with the system losing almost one-third of its per-hour funding within a decade. Ever since the first training package’s introduction in 1997, she said, problems in VET had been blamed on implementation.
“If we’re still saying there are problems with implementation, maybe there’s a problem with the model,” she said. “They’ve been trying to get it right for 20 years.”
CBT places the emphasis on what students can do, rather than what they have learnt.
Students are assessed on their mastery of the skills and knowledge required to perform effectively in the workplace, with those “competencies” specified in training packages and grouped into discrete qualifications.
Dr Wheelahan said all this was based on a questionable assumption that it was feasible to break down tasks into elementary components.
She said the approach led to the fragmentation of knowledge and the “atomisation” of skill, producing graduates with no idea of the wider context of their work and suited only to supervised positions. The result was “routinised job descriptions in which the proactive and reflective worker was left out”, she told a seminar at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.
Dr Wheelahan told the HES that CBT should be replaced by broader vocational streams oriented to general “fields of practice” rather than occupational chunks.
“Instead of preparing people for mental healthcare, aged care, disability care, drug and alcohol care, we focus on preparing care workers. The curriculum would seek to develop the capacity of the person, rather than focusing on particular skills.”
She said CBT had facilitated a race to the bottom in open training markets, because colleges could buy training packages “off the shelf” rather than invest in course design.
If universities gained access to commonwealth subsidies for delivering sub-degree programs — a change proposed in 2014, which is still provided for in the budget — it would be the killer blow for TAFEs. She said appetite for fundamental change to VET was emerging in state education bureaucracies, but resisted at the federal level and by industry peak bodies.
Dr Wheelahan’s presentation built on a paper she published late last year in the International Journal of Training Research, as well as work by fellow researchers at the universities of Sydney and Melbourne.
She said the reliance on CBT to ensure that qualifications were recognised nationally had spawned a “huge edifice of qualifications which don’t pass the economies of scale test”.
“In the hunt for the holy grail of national portability, we’ve constructed a system in which there’s got to be a training package qualification for every occupation — even the smallest — which is incredibly expensive.”
She said the goal of aligning training and occupations had also proven a “disaster”, with just 33 per cent of VET graduates working in jobs related to their qualifications.