Developing Dynamic Meta-Competent Practice: Reimagining the Notion of Quality in the Australian Vocational Education and Training Reform Agenda

1 Introduction

Reform in the Australian Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector is in response to industry, globally, increasingly requiring resilient agency, adaptability and innovation from its labour force to match the new fluid necessities of post-industrial 21C reality (PWC 2013; Graf & Gardin 2018). Learning as a finite suite of knowledge and skills acquired at a vocational education institution to prepare for a static career is now anathema, with industry demanding constant new insight and innovation to meet the needs of an ever-changing global society.

In Australia, the Heads of Agreement for Skills Reform (Australian Government 2020), recognised that Australia’s TVET system was in need of reform to ensure high quality and relevant training. The agreement followed on from the 2019 VET Reform Roadmap (DESSFB 2019), that committed two major reforms that were aimed at strengthening the training system to support Australia’s immediate economic recovery. The first involved simplifying the national VET qualifications and strengthening industry engagement arrangements. The second and more important to this paper involves strengthening quality standards, building the capacity and capability of vocational education institutions for continuous improvement. Both the Heads of Agreement and the Roadmap follow the Department of Education, Skills and Employment’s Rapid Review recommendations (Australian Government 2020), for the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA), which identified trainer and assessor capability as being a strategic initiative as a part of its 2020–2022 regulatory strategy, which has the potential to support the reform agenda. Each of the reform agendas recognise the concerns raised by Australian stakeholders regarding the quality of training and assessment in the TVET sector as they indicated that the quality of training located in the Certificate IV Training and Assessment in Education is inconsistent, and that trainer and assessor capability is a contributing factor (ASQA 2020).

Specifically, key VET Reform Priorities outlined in the Australian Government Heads of Agreement (Australian Government 2020) agenda and the ASQA Rapid Review identifies the need to: develop a shared understanding of what “quality” and “outcomes” look like, how these should be reflected in outcomes-focussed standards and performance assessed by ASQA; build Registered Training Organisations (RTO) capacity and capability for continuous improvement; strengthen quality standards; develop a VET workforce quality strategy; develop resources to support providers to meet the standards including self-assessment tools to encourage continuous improvement.

The reform agenda recognises the need to address persistent questions of quality in the VET sector (Wheelahan 2016; Hodge 2014) and is important to identifying and prioritising outcome measures and supporting these with measures to build the capacity and capability of TVET institutions. Critics of current practice suggest that it is based on a “fragmented, atomistic model of curriculum based on behaviourist notions of knowledge and skill, embedded in a fragmented model of qualifications and a fragmented VET system” (Wheelahan 2016, p. 181). It acts to create an “atomised and aggregated” view of the workplace so that what it is understood to become “competent” in a role, consists of a simple grouping of workplace tasks and roles that have been defined independently of each other in units of competency. This is at odds with viewing the world, industry and community, as being relational, complex and stratified (Bhaskar 1998) and is at odds with visions of a post-industrial, innovative, and agile industry sector.

Given the VET reform priorities place quality at the centre of the agenda, the aim of this paper is to better understand the notion of quality in a contemporary Australian TVET context and to highlight the key elements and implications for developing readiness for quality practice and continuous improvement, at scale. The complexity of practice in the Australian TVET sector is explored, as is the notion of readiness. An individual’s (or RTO’s) readiness (a combination of willingness and ability) to work effectively with complexity and ever-changing industry need is also explored and seen as being aligned with their mindset, or the extent to which they view themselves and their practice as being either script-based or dynamic. That is, the extent to which a practitioner, or RTO, feels agentic and motivated by the search for meaning and validation in one’s own practice, and the drive to collaborate, design new and creative practices, and to share insight is the extent to which they can be characterised as being “ready” for practice and ready for continuous improvement.

Further, this paper will locate readiness for quality practice across four key sector elements: regulatory context, capacity, capabilities and also in terms of competence, or, that is, in terms of the practitioner’s dispositions that direct or determine their professional purpose and mindset. A practitioner’s readiness to understand and develop their practice epistemically across all four sector elements, simultaneously, amounts to a meta-competence, which is identified by this paper as being the key determinant of quality and the key determinant of continuous improvement and strengthening quality standards. That the notion of readiness is currently understood, however, through a static or script-based lens and is represented in stakeholder discourse as being the domain of extrinsic and exclusively cognitive-focussed sector elements, acting to limit the understanding of quality and stymie improvement. The implications, then for building quality, as discussed in this paper, are dependent on recognising and articulating the holistic nature of quality practice and re-interpreting readiness so as to identify necessary reform responses and future professional practice(s).

2 Complexity of Adult Vocational Education and Training

The need for reform emerges from the complex nature of TVET; its varied stakeholders, each with unique purposes and practices, and a responsibility for these being faithfully, holistically and accurately communicated and understood. The structure and practice of TVET in Australia, however, is akin to the children’s game of “Telephone”, where children begin with one message and iteratively pass this message onto one another in a series of “telephone calls”. The game is often invoked as a metaphor for cumulative error or misunderstanding as the original message is invariably mutated during the communication chain. The result in the Australian TVET context is that the process, whereby elicited industry skills are iteratively transformed into teaching and learning designs and practices, often ultimately fail to represent the reality of industry need. That is, the process leads to the complexity of need being communicated in simpler terms or ideal types that do not match the reality of the need. In order for training quality to be recognised and achieved, the game of Telephone must either be changed, or the players be better equipped, to avoid the cumulative errors in understanding.

TVET practice in Australia is designed to provide an inclusive understanding of industry competence via consultative structures and articulated as essential competencies to educators and RTOs. Educators and RTOs are charged with the responsibility of interpreting the industry intent and reality and designing training and assessment to best ensure that the graduate meets a 21C or post-industrial definition of competence in their industry role. The TVET model, then, contains real challenges – that often remain assumed but unseen – that relate to the capacity of educators to achieve a faithful interpretation and build fit for purpose learning programs and continue to innovate at the pace of industry. Figure 1 identifies four elements of professional TVET practice and indicates where the focus for learning for readiness is most evident: (i) competence, (ii) documented competencies and (iii) competency-based training and assessment and (iv) industry currency as a TVET educator. The relationship between elements (iii) and (iv) is a continual movement from classroom to industry experience, which constantly reinforces the validity of the program and the effectiveness of the training.

Figure 1:

TVET model.

The relationship between these elements, like each element individually, is complex and thus difficult to characterise and articulate fully, as intended at each stage. It requires critical reflection and the ability to contextualise and re-contextualise knowledge and experiences. The extent to which TVET educators are able to purposely engage in a “reflective oscillation” between engaging in industry practice effectively and their own TVET practice and program design is the extent to which they are able to holistically prepare students for the realities of contemporary industry practice. That is, by engaging authentically with the reality of the work of the industry, the TVET educator is able to engage in a “live translation” of the workplace to the competency documentation and thus ensure a full and accurate translation into their own training practice.

A danger exists, though, for educators who are not engaged in reflective oscillation between the workplace and the classroom. In this scenario, these educators are more likely to accept high-level unit of competency documentation at face value or adopt a simple behaviourist understanding of their teaching practice. This possibility is significantly increased when the view of competent industry practice is through a 2D black and white lens rather than a 3D high-definition reality. The 2D black and white view allows educators to focus only on the observable cognitive capabilities – skills and knowledge – that contribute to the achievement of the whole competence, rather than the affective competencies that are equally critical to an effective vocational practice. The result is that the training program and the pedagogies employed in the classroom are also of limited value. A high-definition view is enabled by a genuine critical curiosity and creative collaboration with industry and an ability to gather pixels in the form of observations and experiences that enable a high-definition picture of competence.

Demonstrating competence in an authentic workplace context involves more than merely demonstrating cognitive functions, or knowledge and skills. To be a competent worker is not simply completing one procedure after another at the direction of a supervisor. This competence level can be best described as being static, dependent and script-based, which is at odds with the dynamic and fluid nature of current post-industrial vocational expectations. Quality in TVET practice necessarily involves the developmental teaching design and assessment of skills and knowledge but also of the students” attitudes and dispositions so as to elicit evidence not only of immediate capability but of a competence that can be characterised as being dynamic or post-industrial. However, that a static skill or atomised knowledge set can be assessed and accepted as being evidence of a non-routine or complex industry competency points to deficiencies in the level of understanding and translation of the post-industrial need and a lack of real industry currency.

In Figure 2 below, the Vocational Competence Taxonomy indicates thinking levels and characteristic skills that are concordant with this level. The taxonomy makes visible a development sequence and indicates how a learner’s capability grows in complexity, systematically, with sequenced learning from being simple or uni-dimensional at one end of the continuum to being complex or multi-dimensional at the other. It is useful in this context as it articulates the thinking journey that a person must travel in order to practice their chosen vocation to a leading or expert level. That is, once a person is able to demonstrate thinking and action in their role up to and including the Simple Relative quadrant, that person is able to recognise and understand all the necessary fundamental aspects of practice and is able to analyse, explain and interpret materials and contexts. However, without the ability to then go beyond the simple relative understanding to imagine, predict, abstract and innovate, the practice remains at odds with the dynamic and multi-dimensional nature of the current post-industrial vocational expectations.

Figure 2:

Vocational Competence Taxonomy.

This paper proposes two states or poles, uni-dimensional or multi-dimensional, that can be used to characterise a person’s mindset and thus characterise their “readiness” to achieve quality. As represented in Figure 2, the multi-dimensional level of thinking and action is not only able to view all of the essential elements of a single competence in a single context but to see and understand it in multiple contexts, thus enabling future-focussed practices. This dichotomy aligns with Robeyns (Robeyns 2005) and Walker and Unterhalter’s (Walker and Unterhalter 2007) distinction between the simple capabilities that a person possesses, which have the potential to be employed effectively, and complex functioning, which is the enacted ability of a person to select appropriately from multiple held capabilities to fit the need of individual circumstances, whether foreseen or unforeseen.

The multi-dimensional nature of and demands of 4IR vocations require people (employers and employees in all vocational areas) to go beyond simply recognising need and following procedure(s) (Single and Atomised levels). Instead, they are increasingly expecting personnel to analyse, interpret, reflect, formulate and innovate (Relative and Complex Multi-Relational Levels). Importantly, this need is real across vocations and levels within; such that the expectations are that a receptionist at a TAFE is able to undertake complex levels of thinking such as predicting, reflecting, creating, reasoning and innovating as would the TAFE CEO. Similarly, the TAFE CEO would equally identify, follow procedures, describe, define and clarify as the basis for the complex multi-relational thinking that is part of their role.

For the educator, readiness to view their practice with a dynamic multi-dimensional mindset requires critical reflection and the ability to contextualise and re-contextualise skills, knowledge and experiences across educational and vocational realms. This element is the key relational bridge between the TVET educator’s initial training as an industry professional and their training as an educator. This relationship is critical for the accurate and authentic interpretation of the competency documents, which in turn determine the effectiveness of the training. Critically, it is this relationship that needs to be supported through ongoing capacity development practices at an institutional level to both develop the educators” capability but to develop quality outcomes. Research (Hodge 2014) highlights the sophisticated ability or meta-competence to purposefully and confidently interpret training package intent and unit of competency learning outcomes and intent. Hodge suggests that “it may be unrealistic to expect that initial or continuing education based on single training events will develop competency in interpretation to the level specified in the relevant certificate IV competencies” (p. 27).

Figure 3 below locates Vocational Educator Competence Taxonomy in TVET educator practice, specifically. To be competent as a TVET educator, competence needs to be achieved in both an industry and an education context to practice, which is reflected in the shaded section. The figure indicates that a TVET educator is competent both in a given industry vocation and being competent as a TVET educator to a simple relative level. The challenge for TVET educators is that both need then to be synthesised by the educator to achieve a competent, holistic, and multi-dimensional TVET capability, able to understand and practice at a complex multi-relational level. The synthesis is indicated by the shaded nodes of the TVET competence being integrated with the clear nodes of the industry competence. The advanced TVET practice quadrant highlights that the innovation competency in TVET education that is demanded by industry is undertaken as a synthesised competence. The multi-relational quadrant thus characterises a readiness to achieve TVET quality.

Figure 3:

TVET educator practice.

3 Defining Readiness

Readiness is a ubiquitous and complex concept but nonetheless a critical one in terms of understanding the ability of institutions and individual teachers to achieve “quality” in an ever-changing social and economic environment, locally and globally. The ability, or readiness of the institutions to identify, measure and report the achievement of quality rests on the capacity of its teachers to undertake this work at a course level. With readiness itself being an ideal type, it is first necessary to define this term in order to discuss the implications of the current practice and make recommendations about effective ways to build individual and institutional readiness necessary to achieve the high-level goals. This paper distinguishes between the state of simple competence and the state of being ready for the purposes of providing “high quality and relevant training”. This has significant implications for educators in developing students” readiness for vocational work and for life.

A simple competence fulfils a stated or fixed purpose, standard or procedure at a fixed and foreseen moment in time. Intrinsic to simple competence, also, is a lack of agency and a reliance on a script or for another to provide direction (Usher 2019; Deakin Crick et al. 2013). Conversely, the state of readiness refers to a sense of comfort, agency and a feeling of preparedness not merely for known standards, actions or outcomes but also for the unknown, present or future. The notion of readiness suggests the person can or will be able to move, change and adapt and to respond to need. “By definition, competencies involve the ability to meet complex demands by drawing on and mobilizing psychological resources (including skills and attributes) across different contexts” (OECD 2002, p. 4).

4 Developing Readiness: The VET Ecosystem and the Meta-Competence

The need, then, is to explore the notion of readiness by adopting an understanding of teacher practice as a meta-competence. Readiness in the Australian VET sector should therefore be located in a person’s or institutions” ability to navigate the VET “ecosystem”. The ecosystem consists of four elements; they being the regulatory context (ASQA), the capacity of the educators being their qualifications, access to and value of professional learning, currency of both industry skills and qualifications; capabilities in terms of teaching, assessment, industry collaboration and working in systems in terms of compliance. The fourth element identifies the competency of the educator, or their “world view” that informs and directs how they view and employ their skills, knowledge and attitudes and values. Each of these elements is of equal importance to developing and sustaining quality teachers who are able to develop graduates who are in turn ready to meet industry needs.

Figure 4, below, aligns the four VET ecosystem elements with the competence/readiness dichotomy. It characterises each end of the continuum that exists between the simple competence of a practitioner and their readiness. That is, a TVET practitioner who is ready, views their practice through a multi-dimensional lens; they view the context as being complex; they view their learning and the credentials that underpin their capabilities as having intrinsic value; they understand the intrinsic value of learning contributes to their view of their own capability as being scholarly in nature; and they understand their competence as being dynamic, ever changing and growing. Figure 4 outlines the poles that bookend the mindset continua associated with the four elements of TVET practice.

Figure 4:

TVET Ecosystem Continua.

Engeström’s activity theory (2000) is a useful model to understand, develop, and explicate the complex nature of vocational learning, and it is important to surfacing individual and institutional mindsets and states of readiness (Eames and Cates 2011). Activity theory, an evolution of the work of Vygotsky (Roth and Lee 2007), promotes purposeful and visible learning and practice for all active participants as an outcome of dynamic interplay (Jacobs and Usher 2018). Effective vocational teaching and learning practice should involve contribution from all stakeholders as the multiple perspectives concept of development can lead to strengthening and supporting the quality of programs/organizations (Khampirat and McRae 2016). That is, it depends on the complex relationships between the characteristics of institution, employer supervisor, student, organizational and national environments. What is needed in the Australian TVET system are more effective methods by which to systemically surface and articulate the complexity of need and the complexity of process needed to fulfil the need. A lack of an accepted learning language and discourse serves to stymie discourse and activities that are needed to surface to support sustainable continuous improvement and development of meta-competence.

A professional meta-competence (see for example Deakin Crick et al. 2004) is the interface between the holistic conception of the person or institution and the demands of the VET “ecosystem”, which is of critical importance to students developing attitudes, skills, and dispositions that will enable them to succeed in the 21C context. Critical to the achievement of vocational meta-competence is the facilitation of teachers” own movement between the reflection on themselves as people and as learners (competence) and as developers of discrete skill sets, knowledge, understandings of themselves (capacity) and of others (capabilities) according to the ASQA framework and to community need (context), this constitutes their professional role or their meta-competence. The concept of the meta-competence acts as a structural facilitator of this movement and is important not only in vocational teacher education but across all industry areas.

In Figure 5, each of the key VET practice elements is represented with the centre as the meta-competence compass. Important are the epistemic interconnections between each of the elements to the meta-competence but also to each other. For example, the interconnection between Competence and Capability informs the TVET professional not only of the skills, knowledge and attitudes and values that are intrinsic to quality teaching, assessing, collaboration and compliance, but also allows the professional to reflect on themselves as scholars in authentic practice spaces (Usher 2019). Similarly, the meta-competence enables the institution to navigate each of the ecosystem elements and to work strategically to identify and strengthen the links between each of the ecosystem elements, so that they grow.

Figure 5:

TVET Ecosystem.

While the four elements are mutually enabling, the element of competence contributes to the meta-competence through an affective lens, which provides the professional with a distinct perspective from the cognitive lens through which the other elements are viewed. The competence element allows the professional to understand themselves and their role as both educator and learner, as both industry professional and teaching professional. This is critical to the meta-competence at the heart of the elements, which signifies the readiness of the VET professional to navigate the sector as a whole, simultaneously drawing upon each element as “inspiration” for practice and improvement of each of the others. Importantly, the ability to navigate the elements endows the professional with an agency that supports an understanding of and the ability to create effective teaching and learning.

5 Meta-Competence in Action: The Challenge of Interpretation

Critical to being ready as a TVET educator is understanding their context as being dynamic, occupying multiple spaces simultaneously. That is, being able to not merely design, teach or assess in a static isolation but to understand the dynamic outcome through the multi-focal lens of an industry professional and community member as well as a vocational educator. The dynamic multi-focal view of the need and the education method is challenging as training package and unit of competency documentation presents only single focal lenses. Figure 6 emphasises that the meta-competence exists beyond the ASQA regulatory context, the unit of competency documentation, and beyond the educators’ qualifications, presented in Figure 5, to include the industry context. By adding the industry context as a lens through which to view meta-competence, it is critical to understand that it necessitates adding industry lenses through which to view the Capacity, Capability and Competence elements, also. That is, the relationship between teaching and industry exist in each of the four elements and necessitates the educator’s continual movement from education to industry experience and consciousness, which constantly reinforces the validity of the program and the effectiveness of the training.

Figure 6:

Expanded TVET Ecosystem.

A danger exists, though, for educators who aren’t “ready” to occupy both teaching and industry spaces simultaneously and are thus not engaged in reflective oscillation between the workspace and the teaching space. Solely occupying the teaching space, educators are much more likely to accept high-level competency documentation at face value or adopt a simple behaviourist understanding of their teaching practice. This possibility is significantly increased when the view of competent industry practice is through a static lens rather than dynamic lived reality. The static view allows educators to focus only on the observable skills and knowledge that are involved in the achievement of the immediate outcomes, rather than the affective competencies that are equally critical to an effective vocational practice. The result is that the training program and the pedagogies employed in the classroom through the static lens are also of limited value. A 3D view is enabled by involvement with industry and an ability to gather pixels in the form of observations and experiences that enable a high-definition picture of what constitutes quality in TVET.

The professional meta-competence aligns with and supports the Boyer framework of scholarly practice, which is a current practice focus in Victoria and underpins the reforms associated with the Victorian TAFE Teaching Staff Agreement 2018. Scholarly practice is critical to educators individually and also as a sector as it forms the basis of discourse that shares complex and contextual understandings; the discourse is important as it both facilitates new insights and understandings and distributes them sector wide in a way that formal hierarchical professional learning cannot. Hodge (Hodge 2014) highlights that current TVET teachers see effective practice being better supported by more informal learning and spanning longer periods than single event professional learning events. He suggests that participation in activities such as assessment validation, industry consultation and educator networks if approached with a learning purpose are of real value but that they are not supported in that way. Figure 7 highlights the Vocational Educator Competence Taxonomy as it supports either script-based practice or scholarly practice. The multi-dimensional quadrant is characteristic of scholarly practice and also indicative of the need for professional learning to be purposeful, ongoing, and embedded in the educators” authentic practices.

Figure 7:

Vocational Competence Taxonomy Scholarly Practice Continuum.

The Boyer framework consists of the scholarships of discovery, or the search for new knowledge; of integration connecting disciplines through synthesis; of application or asking how knowledge can be applied to contemporary issues to test new theory and knowledge; of teaching or transforming and extending knowledge in addition to transmitting; and the scholarship of engagement, or engaging with the community–with the purpose of addressing issues. The framework fits within the broader scholarship of teaching and learning literature (see for example, Trigwell et al. 2000; Marsick 1988; Kazemi et al. 2009) and is important here as it highlights the meta-competence that TVET educators need to possess to understand and achieve quality. That is, to distinguish between rote application of routine and using routines to reason is critical (Singer-Gabella 2012, p. 414). Purposeful structures in schools that support teachers, to imagine and reimagine, through scholarly practice, precisely what effective vocational teaching and learning should look like in their own context. What is needed are pedagogies and practices that are consciously developed for teachers to think with rather than for sets of teaching behaviours and practices to be automated.

Critical to the achievement of student success, then, is teachers’ individual and the RTO’s collective readiness to sustainably engage in scholarly discourse that is rooted in a learner language and is thus able to define and support meta-competent (quality) practice. The opportunity and need, then, is for TVET educators to reflect on, explore, and create co-constructed applied learning identities themselves in order to better create applied learning communities. By exploring, creating and modelling “quality” as a dynamic scholarly learning and teaching community, RTOs can support the development of educators and all TVET stakeholders to understand themselves as learners, enabling a positive impact upon how they understand quality, engage in their education, and participate in and across vocational communities.

At the centre is the person’s own learner dispositions or identity, that act as the connector between how they view themselves as individuals, as industry experts and as TVET educators who are charged with the responsibility of developing others to succeed in the 21C post-industrial context. Figure 8 indicates seven dispositional indicators of a learner identity, which support the TVET competency and capability elements and indicates the links to the five Boyer elements of scholarly practice. The model identifies the seven dispositions at the core of the TVET practitioners’ total practice, which ultimately determine readiness to practice. In the diagram, the skills, knowledge and attitudes and values align with the holistic competences that are demanded both by Industry 4.0 and are essential to develop in TVET students. The seven core dispositions are also critical to the direct capabilities demanded of TVET treachers. Both holistic competences and direct TVET teacher capabilities combine then to create both the OECD transformative competencies and elements of the Boyer model of scholarship. The model should represent the core purpose of both teacher professional development and teacher training.

Figure 8:

Critical Dispositional Indicators.

6 The Role of ASQA in the Reform. The Issue of Quality: Who Defines it and How?

Questions of reform and of quality in the VET sector should necessarily involve consideration of key understandings and definitions of quality, which frame discourses and relationships between stakeholders and ultimately practice and outcomes. Critical to the understanding of quality and its practice is ASQA, as it has a mandated role to ensure nationally approved standards are met as outlined in the VET Quality Framework. ASQA, as the sector regulator, sets the tone if not the agenda for quality and its risk-based audit model has developed into a defacto definition of quality, despite this not being the stated intent. Such is the power differential at the heart of the relationship; the ASQA risk-based practices have served to entrench a minimalist understanding of quality, which, in turn, acts to stymie continuous improvement. (Hodge 2014).

ASQA views its role as guarding against irresponsible practice at one end of the quality spectrum, while at the other, “focusing the “eyes” of all the sector on quality [that] is essential to ensure desirable student outcomes”. Critically, however, it maintains that “improving the quality of teachers should not be a matter for ASQA to solve for the sector” (Braithwaite 2018). Instead, ASQA views teacher quality as being the responsibility of the RTOs, both in terms of developing their practice and sustaining it through professional learning. While this is not unreasonable, the reality is that being both promoter of quality and of RTOs’ self-assurance on the one hand but gatekeeper of narrowly defined high-stakes compliance measures on the other, contributes to a confusion from RTOs about the nature of the relationship with ASQA; quality partner or compliance police?

Despite proactively encouraging RTOs to move beyond compliance terminology to communicate their reality of quality practice, the risk-based practices that RTOs themselves implement mean that they, nonetheless, default to “quality as compliance” mindset and practice. Extrinsic compliance measures such as qualifications, facilities and resources, alignment to standards, capstone assessments, industry alignment and industry currency are “ideal types” and thus opaque in terms of determining quality in real terms or differentiating between approximate reality and the lived reality.

Further exacerbating the problem is that there is limited opportunity in an audit setting for capturing the teacher readiness necessary to foster an inquiring mind, problem solve, or develop confidence in applying skills, all of which are of critical value in any workplace (Braithwaite 2018). The reliance on ideal types in the audit process to characterise practice acts to entrench an extrinsic understanding of learning and of practice, where a learning terminology is necessary. “[A]bsent a shared language, we can neither articulate common questions nor establish common tools” (Singer-Gabella 2012, p. 1). That is, without a shared learning language and discourse, the prospects for meaningful reform and quality improvement are severely diminished. The ASQA risk-based model thus risks acting to sanction practice and perpetuate teachers who, though compliant, do not ultimately possess the readiness to develop students for an ever-changing industry role. In order to ready and support teachers to self-evaluate, recognize and develop their practice then, there is a need to identify a conceptual vocabulary of quality beyond the ideal type and compliance and to form the basis of a new quality discourse.

7 Current TVET Discourses

Further to a conceptual vocabulary, then, we consider the prevailing stakeholder discourse (Braithwaite 2018) in the Australian vocational education and training context and ask the critical question of whether educators are being supported to develop the necessary multi-dimensional TVET readiness to negotiate the ever-changing and increasingly sophisticated post-industrial work in industry in line with the goals of the Heads of Agreement for Skills Reform and the VET Reform Roadmap. The de facto understanding of what quality is and looks like in VET institutions in Australia then is critical when approaching the VET Reform Roadmap and ensuring “high quality and relevant training”. The discourses that represent quality and the ASQA-RTO relationship are critical to understand current practice and are also necessary to imagining and identifying future practices that are capable of meeting the needs outlined in the reform agenda; it is the discourse in the VET sector that defines and reinforces practice and ultimately determines outcomes.

What the current discourse reveals is a focus on three “cognitive” elements of VET practice, them being context, capacity and capability. The context outlines the regulatory environment as represented by the ASQA’s risk-based regulatory approach consisting of end-to-end student focussed outputs ranging from marketing to completion measures. The capacity element outlines the extrinsic markers of competent TVET teacher practice such as qualifications, professional development, currency, and vocational competencies. The capability element describes competent practice as comprising teaching, assessing, and industry collaboration in terms that align with working within systems and compliance measures. What is absent, though, is an “affective” or dispositional element that outlines and validates “competence” (or meta-competence in the ideal case) as being a critical part of the discourse. The competence element is a critical enabling element for readiness in VET as it makes visible a practitioner’s “purpose compass” or world view, which is manifested in learner aligned dispositions such as critical enquiry, learning growth orientation, agency and relational learning amongst others.

This research is located in the Australian Government’s All eyes on quality: Review of the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act 2011 report (Braithwaite 2018) as it provides a valuable window into stakeholder views of quality. Its value lay not in the furious agreement from all stakeholders of the need for quality across training, assessing, student outcomes and industry outcomes and the need for each stakeholder to play their part. The value lay in the language of the discourse itself, which reveals a reliance on compliance language and extrinsic ideal types to describe quality, which has been proven to date not to be sufficient (Wheelahan 2016; Hodge 2014). Language of capacity and capabilities mirrors a regulatory framework which, by ASQA’s own admission, is not a framework to ensure or even define quality but rather to minimise the risk of unscrupulous practices. Therein lay the issue as the discourse evident in the stakeholder feedback mirrors a script-based or compliance language and understanding rather than a dynamic or scholarly understanding of a roadmap to quality VET.

In Figure 9 below, 120 stakeholder submissions to the Australian Government’s All eyes on quality: Review of the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act 2011 report (Braithwaite 2018) have been coded and represented using the poles associated with the four TVET elements. What was clear from the data was that the discourse was weighted heavily towards a uni-dimensional understanding of practice and need in the TVET sector. References were largely to extrinsic learning, to simple conceptions of context, to static readiness and to script-based teaching and learning practices. There were clear examples of multi-dimensional thinking, largely within the element of Context, however, interestingly, these submissions dealt almost exclusively with critiquing the ASQA audit practice rather than offering critical reflection of their own practice. Of further interest was the dearth of submissions that dealt with the element of Competence.

Figure 9:

TVET Stakeholder Submissions (coded).

This study conducted an inductive data reduction to analyze stakeholder feedback data contained in Braithwaite’s review (Braithwaite 2018). The feedback data, consisting of open-ended survey responses, were first examined through an iterative process of reading and immersion. This initial stage allowed a comprehensive understanding of the content and context of the responses. An inductive approach was used to identify emerging themes and patterns directly from the data, without the imposition of pre-existing categories or theoretical frameworks. As key themes began to emerge, the data were coded according to “simple” and “complex” poles; the simple pole representing a uni-dimensional TVET world view and the multi-dimentional pole representing a multi-dimentional world view. Through a process of thematic reduction, the data were condensed and grouped into categories reflecting each of the core elements of the TVET ecosystem. The categorization process was continuously refined as the analysis progressed, with constant comparisons made between different data points to ensure consistency and depth. Ultimately, this inductive method facilitated a nuanced and contextually grounded understanding of the stakeholders” perspectives, revealing a clear alignment with a simple or uni-dimensional TVET world view. The emergent picture, then, from the review in terms of understanding quality and quality practice in TVET, then, is that the current discourse is closely aligned to a uni-dimensional understanding, focussed on atomised competences rather than being multi-dimensional and focussed on the development at scale of a complex “competency”.

The element of competency, as opposed to atomised competences, is a marker of teaching and learning quality that not only develops and assesses student capabilities but in so doing, models and develops their readiness to successfully navigating and negotiating the post-industrial vocational world. Discourses that support this competency and readiness, then, are critical to achieving the intended reform. To this end, the OECD definition of competency is a useful one as it enables effective teaching and learning to be characterized as being more than merely a vehicle for students to acquire particular knowledge and skills but one that is critical in achieving broader social and economic goals through lifelong learning. “By definition, competencies involve the ability to meet complex demands by drawing on and mobilizing psychological resources across different contexts” (OECD 2002). The transformative competences that are critical to enable this success are identified in the OECD Transforming Education 2030 (OECD 2018), as being necessary to creating new value, reconciling tensions and dilemmas, taking responsibility in contemporary national and global society; these are intrinsic to the competency element and are critical to the reform agenda.

8 Professional Meta-Competence Is at the Core of Quality

To develop readiness at scale, then, the individual elements that constitute the meta-competence must be understood both as being discrete and as being interdependent (Figure 10). That is, each element exists as a visible, measurable entity but equally, each exists as being interconnected and serves to mutually reinforce each other. Figure 10 outlines the competence skills and mindset that are integral to a practitioner’s teaching, assessing and industry collaboration capability. It indicates the correlation between a practitioner’s competence and their capabilities both in terms of teaching and assessing and also their industry currency. The practitioner’s competence and capability, having been identified as being interconnected and interdependent can then be developed by targeted and effective professionals of capacity development that recognise and support learning in authentic practice or capability context so as to support and to define quality in the ASQA and industry regulatory context.

Figure 10:

VET Meta-Competence Interdependence Model.

As indicated, the readiness of a practitioner to achieve the level of the reform outcomes, depends on them adopting a dynamic mindset (Deakin Crick et al. 2013; Deakin Crick et al. 2004) and practice competences. A person with a dynamic mindset “has a purpose, a process and content and is navigating a learning pathway in response to their agentic purpose” (Deakin Crick et al. 2013) The mindset then is both an indicator and a facilitator of a person’s thinking levels (Biggs 2003; Costa 1981; Bloom 1954) and learner dispositions. A person’s ability to think at different levels aligns with cognitive hierarchy theory and is linked to how a person views themselves as learner. For example, a person who has a propensity to learn strategically, be creative, search for meaning and act with agency is likely to be conscious of and able to employ thinking that ranges from the mono-structural to the multi-dimensional. Conversely, a person with a static learner mindset or who lacks a strong learner identity feels dependent and alone when learning and is motivated by extrinsic factors.

These competences then support the professional practices that practitioners undertake and are predictors of the level of practice. In the diagram, a person with a dynamic mindset and who has a strong learner identity will be more likely to design and deliver teaching practices that align with effective practices identified in research (Hattie 2009; Deakin Crick et al. 2013) such as fostering deep understanding, teaching student how to learn, and designing learning as self-discovery. Further, a strong learner identity and dynamic mindset will support approaches that represent effective industry collaboration and development of quality industry currency such as understanding the convergence of theory and practice in industry, seeking and offering new practices and perspectives, and collaboratively negotiating learning outcomes and methods with industry professionals (Figure 11).

Figure 11:

Multi-Dimensional TVET Competency Venn.

Understanding the link then between competence and capability, is critical to recognising the value of the authentic practice as being the critical context for the professional development of capacity. That is, professional development as scholarly practice as identified by Boyer (1996); Schön (1983); and Trigwell (2000) is effective because it is located in the practitioner’s authentic work and thus offers opportunities for critical reflection and collaboration that is difficult, if not impossible to recreate in “external” programs. However, merely locating professional learning in the practitioner’s authentic teaching and assessing activities will not in itself bring about scholarly practice. Without approaching practice with a learner identity and a dynamic mindset, reflection on professional practice can serve merely to reinforce a static mindset and further entrench a “compliance first” practice that is characterised by dependence on script, extrinsically motivated and dependent on industry and regulatory demands.

To sustainably and purposefully develop readiness, then, a functional and sustainable model of quality vocational capacity development, nationally, hinges on the ability of the leaders of vocational institutions to purposefully and sustainably create structures and practices within their institutions to measurably develop the competence and capability of practitioners. Structural practices that support ongoing and sustainable development of trainers is essential as while the initial TVET training enables educators to competently practice, the development of advanced practice is required to fulfil the objectives of the CBT model (Hodge 2014; Mitchell et al. 2006; Clayton et al. 2010). That is, sustainable success comes from the development of educators’ high-level ability to navigate the vocational education ecosystem, which involves interpreting industry competency to high levels to ensure quality practice. However, the current (and past) discernible discourse in Australian TVET suggests that there is an over reliance/unrealistic view of capacity and a simplistic script-based view of capability. The discourse aligns with a static view of practice that recognises compliance as quality.

9 Implications/Recommendations

Given, then, that the high level TVET reform priorities rightly place quality at the centre of the agenda, the aim of this paper has been to better understand the notion of quality in a contemporary Australian TVET context and to highlight the key elements and implications for developing readiness for quality practice and continuous improvement, at scale. The case for re-interpreting the notion of readiness as being both in terms of a personal and professional mindset and characteristic dispositions is at the core of future improvement. It forms the basis of our shared understanding of what “quality” and “outcomes” look like, how these should be reflected in outcomes-focussed standards and performance assessed by ASQA. With this understanding, RTOs are better prepared to build capacity and capability for continuous improvement and, in so doing, strengthening quality standards across the sector.

An effective TVET workforce quality strategy, then, would necessarily involve measures that achieve a change in discourse from uni-dimensional to multi-dimensional and from a script-based mindset and practice to a dynamic mindset and scholarly practice.