Researching VET staff development: the changing role of a poor cousin in current training reform in Australia
Dr Roger Harris
Centre for Research in Education, Equity and Work
University of South Australia
Summary of presentation at the 3rd International Conference "Researching Vocational Education and Training" July 14 - July 16 1999, Bolton Institute
Introduction
Researching VET - the Conference theme - is a relatively recent activity, at least on the scale it is today. The sector itself has gained increasing prominence over the past decade or two, particularly as a result of the recognition of the significance of vocational education and training in the changing economy and global marketplace. In parallel manner, research in and on VET has also gained in quantum and visibility with the need for deeper understanding of the many complex issues embedded in the sector. This paper first examines the nature of VET research, with particular reference to Australia, in an attempt to explain the “poor cousin” status of VET staff development. Then the role of the teacher in the current VET climate is explored to argue the continuing importance of staff development despite the dearth of research. Finally, a summary is provided of what research has and has not told us about VET staff development.
Researching VET in Australia
VET research in Australia has expanded considerably over the past six years. The first major report on this subject was No small change (McDonald et al. 1993) which reported that research in VET was fragmented, only an estimated 0.2% of all sources on VET was spent on research, and links between research and policy and practice were weak. The advent of specific national funding for VET research, under two National Research and Development Strategies for VET, has stimulated VET research tremendously since 1994.
A second major report, The impact of research on VET decision making (Selby-Smith et al. 1998), however, has revealed that there are only a small number (eight) of research programs in which most of the research occurred from 1988 to 1996. It concluded that “the overall research effort in Australian VET is substantially one of fragmentation and one-off activity rather than forming a cohesive, incremental approach to the expansion of knowledge” (p.103). The authors highlighted that a heavy proportion of the research effort was concentrated in curriculum development and/or delivery, assessment and students/trainees (p.104).
It is highly significant that neither in the lists of research programs nor content areas was staff development mentioned. It is the invisible ingredient in the VET research pie, despite its undoubted influence on all of the content areas listed. Why is this? The reasons for its ‘poor cousin’ status are intricately bound up in the nature of VET research per se.
Firstly, VET research in general, in which staff development is embedded, is itself low in status. Kell (1999:8) contends that “VET research has always languished as a poor and relatively silent cousin of research on the schools and higher education sectors”, and Seddon (1998: Part 1, 21) argues that “until recently, research in VET did not have a high profile”, remaining “underdeveloped, … undervalued … and largely unacknowledged”. Universities tended not to focus on VET; in any case, VET “has been regarded within higher education as a somewhat narrow and instrumental endeavour” (Garrick & Chappell 1996:2) and of “relatively low prestige” (Attwell 1997).
Secondly, a key characteristic of VET research in general is its very close links with policy (Selby-Smith et al. 1998:110, Kell 1999:8, Seddon 1998: Part 1). While on the positive side this suggests responsiveness, on the negative it also suggests immediacy - that research activity has emphasised short-term needs, potentially at the cost of longer-term needs. This has significant implications for research in staff development. Staff development does not appear to have been high on the agenda of policy-makers over the past decade. On the contrary, in the political press to shift VET to more of a demand than a supply driven system, and to establish a modular, packaged CBT system, it could be argued VET staff have been marginalised and their place in the grand VET picture little considered and valued. The disbanding in 1996 of the National Staff Development Committee of the Australian National Training Authority, and the decision that only a limited number of national staff development projects would be funded (Smith & Keating 1997: 195) is a clear reflection of the downplaying of staff development. At the same time, around the mid-1990s, the universities, as a consequence of reduced government funding, were considerably downsizing staff numbers and rationalising programs, and VET teacher education staff and programs were certainly not exempt. Thus, while the VET teachers’ role has shifted dramatically, staff development to assist them to cope with this changed political climate has been very low, if it appears at all, on the priority lists of policy makers. Accordingly, this has not been perceived as an area worthy of research when considered against other topics.
Thirdly, increasing casualisation of the workforce, including in VET, has meant more short-term, contract and sessional staff in the sector. In this situation, employers become less willing to pay for staff development. Thus staff development is not a high priority and becomes more of an individual responsibility, if it is undertaken at all. In this situation, staff development as a researchable topic is hardly likely to excite VET researchers.
Fourthly, now that VET comprises private as well as public providers, research on subjects like staff development has been made all that much more complex. The increasing multiplicity of private providers means that is it is hard to take a snapshot at any one time to research staff development provision. Especially is this the case in the current competitive environment, when providers are, understandably, not particularly keen on examination of their affairs and when staff development is in all likelihood not high on their priorities. Small businesses are more likely to buy in expertise than to engage in expensive and longterm staff developing processes.
Fifthly, increasing devolution of public providers also makes staff development difficult to research. Any one VET institute may have many campuses scattered geographically across a very wide region. Staff development is therefore now dispersed and scattered, having been gradually through the 1990s devolved to individual institutions from centralised, state-wide staff development units. There are no longer systemic activities or statistics. This has led to at least one author labelling VET as “messy” and lacking “clarity of direction” (Hanrahan 1997:8). As a result, it is very difficult for researchers to gauge quantity, quality and effectiveness of staff development provision.
And lastly, staff development is an expensive endeavour and therefore often honoured more in the rhetoric than the practice of VET managers. This contributes to it being largely invisible to researchers. As training is to many enterprises, so staff development is to many VET institutions - perceived more as an expense than an investment, and in a competitive climate, seen as only increasing the chances of ‘employee poaching’. In her recent evaluation of staff development programs, Perkins (1997: 6-7) noted that staff development is frequently viewed as a peripheral activity which takes teachers and trainers away from what are perceived to be their 'core' tasks; there have often been multiple programs offered which are not linked in any way and involve duplication of effort for often high cost and low impact; and there is often little or no support from managers/supervisors for staff development, serving to limit its impact within organisations.
Having provided an overview of the status of VET research in Australia and where the poor cousin of staff development embeds within it, let us briefly examine the position of the teacher within the current VET climate.
The VET teacher within the current VET climate
In the current VET climate in Australia, and perhaps in other countries too (cf. the EUROPROF Project), many have argued that teachers are becoming de-professionalised. This view can perhaps be seen most clearly in a comparison of the role of VET teachers today with that of some years ago. The 1970s in Australia were growth years in building TAFE teacher education programs and staff within universities. It was a time when TAFE teachers pressed for parity with their primary and secondary teacher counterparts, and part of the process of achieving such parity was perceived to be teacher training in three year higher education qualifications of equivalent length and quality. That decade was also the golden time of TAFE following the highly influential Kangan Report (1974), which established TAFE as a distinct educational sector and established a broader educational and social role based on the principles of access, equity, primacy of the individual learner and the need for continuing vocational education.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the role of the TAFE teacher was one encompassing a high degree of classroom teaching and curriculum development, together with industry liaison. The context in which this knowledge and skill was to be demonstrated was relatively more stable than it is today. Apprenticeship numbers continued to be high, traineeships were introduced and boosted numbers passing through TAFE institutions, and the economy was healthy.
However, the 1990s have changed this situation markedly. Tight economic conditions, government rationalist policies and a changing labour market have altered the role of the TAFE teacher dramatically. One recent report boldly pronounces it “a paradigm shift ... in the profile of the TAFE teacher’s professional relationship with the TAFE enterprise” (OTFE 1997, Vol 1:6). The most influential factors in this change arguably have been the emphasis on competency-based training and assessment, the introduction of an open training market, and the national focus on the demand, rather than the supply, side of the equation. Collectively, these factors have fundamentally transformed VET’s orientation from education to business and service, and shifted the VET teacher from teaching and creating curriculum more towards entrepreneurial brokering and delivery of prescribed competencies within pre-packaged modules in a climate of intense market competition.
It is in this very shift that the VET teacher can be seen as becoming de-professionalised (Waterhouse & Sefton 1997), even “McDonaldised” (Hyland 1998). The knowledge and skills of the broad-based teacher are being supplanted by a “middle-person” role of, on the one hand, interpreting written competencies developed by non-educational “others”, and on the other, checking performance of students on these competencies. Many of those who entered the profession for the love of developing students and creating the curricula to do so believe that they are actually now not doing these things.
Simultaneously, the VET teacher has been living through a decade of downsizing, retrenchment and “packaging”. The climate has not exactly been one of loyalty and trust, and so the professional attitude of “going the extra mile’ has not really been in evidence. The increasing casualisation of the workforce, including VET teaching, and the concomitant heavier and more widespread workloads of those who have remained, have made the VET teacher somewhat suspicious of the motives of employers and their wholesale acceptance of government policy. Their role is often now one that includes the management of other, less experienced entrants into VET institutions - supervising, checking, administering, liaising and so on, as distinct from actually doing the work of teaching and curriculum creation. In addition, the ageing of this more long-serving workforce in many cases may mean that they are the least inclined to adjust to rapid change. With the emergence of new discipline areas - especially those based on new technologies and non-standard forms of work - the VET teacher may often feel out-of-date, out-of-step and no longer valued. All of this contributes to the perceived de-professionalisation of the VET workforce.
In this context, then, staff development today assumes a significance greater than it has ever had before. Reports pontificate about the need for VET staff development to assist VET teachers cope with change and their own rapidly shifting role. However, it is no easy task! Staff development is itself undergoing serious challenges that are not often fully understood.
What can we learn about VET staff development from research?
So how does research into staff development fare in this scenario? What has research told us about VET staff development?
1.Staff development’s role is changing drastically, and there is a need for it to be
reconceptualised
Appendix A illustrates in summary form the changing nature of staff development from the 1970s to the 1990s. The changing context outlined in the first part of this paper, and especially the increasing number of “portfolio workers” (those compiling their employment from a mix of sessional or fractional time appointments, and increasingly with a variety of public and private providers), has led to a number of very significant shifts for staff development. It has become, for example, increasingly focused, just-in-time and tethered to governmental policy.
As a consequence, there is a need for more theory-building and re-conceptualisation of staff development in the VET arena, as the move towards “primacy of recent experience and ‘just-in-time’ teacher induction reflects a changed concept of teaching in the [VET] sector” (OTFE 1997, Vol. 1: 6). The key difficulties, however, are that staff development is so closely linked to prevailing policy and practice that it remains a constantly moving target, and that VET is so deceptively different from both school and enterprise contexts that it is problematic trying to learn from studies in these areas (Smith 1999).
In an attempt to understand the context of the near future in which staff development would be playing a role, we undertook a Delphi survey as part of our current study on the changing role of staff development (Harris et al., in progress). We asked 56 VET leaders around Australia to nominate critical challenges which they believed VET teachers will face over the next five to seven years (Smith & Hill 1999). The first round was an open question, responses were collated and in the second round, participants were asked to rank their seven most important categories. Table 1 shows their 11 highest responses (points were allocated: 7 for first ranking, 6 for second and so on. The table shows the total points when all respondents’ points were added).
Clearly ‘operate in competitive market’ stands out as the major issue that the VET leaders believed teachers will face in the near future. The next 10 challenges could be interpreted as “major” ones scoring 41 or more, while all other responses rated 26 or less. These major responses reflect the predominance of policy influences on the VET teacher’s role.
Table 1: Critical challenges that VET teachers will face in the next 5-7 years
Critical challenges (derived from an open question in Round 1)
/Total points (from Round 2)
Operate in competitive market / 117Keeping up to date/understanding changes to VET / 68
Flexible delivery / 66
Understand/work with Training Packages / 61
Use of technology / 51
Understanding dilemmas in educator’s role (eg. industry needs versus education) / 50
Understanding changing nature of work / 48
Changing role of facilitator / 48
Keeping up to date with industry trends / 45
Pace of change / 41
Maintaining own employment/career pattern in insecure times / 41
* Out of a sample of 56, 27 (48%) responded to the first round and 30 to the second round (53%).
2.There are various contemporary staff development models, and none are beyond
critique
The literature abounds in different ways of classifying staff development. Some writers talk of “deficit” and “growth” models, others of “educational orientations”, others of “forms” or “approaches”. In a recent study of VET staff development directions in Australia, we conceptualised the types of staff development we researched in case studies into four main categories – just-as-planned, just-in-case, just-in-time and just-for-me (see Appendix B). Each had its advantages and disadvantages, and the decision regarding which to use in any particular context depended on such factors as the context in which change is to be made, the nature of the change, resources available and the preferences of the change agent(s) (Harris & Simons 1997:118).
Within the current policy context in Australia, one particular approach to staff development is officially favoured at present, namely, work-based learning. This approach mirrors the political trend towards the valuing of workplace learning in VET in general, and reflects the disillusionment with “train-the-trainer” type models of earlier years (Harris 1993, Volkoff & Ahern 1995). Federal Government funding is available through two national frameworks for VET staff development called Framing the Future and LearnScope, which are workbased learning frameworks for staff development on the implementation of the National Training Framework and flexible delivery respectively (Field 1998;
Traditional staff development models have been characterised by a clear separation of work and education (Volkoff & Ahern 1995). Consequently many programs have lacked a coherent interface with industry and organisational support and incentives for individuals to participate in these programs has been limited. We know now that work and learning are much more closely linked. Teachers/trainers use frequently and rate highly work-based learning as a form of staff development. A Victorian study (OTFE 1996: 6, 52) on leading practices in staff development of teachers/trainers in training organisations found that respondents rated work-based learning far above the other two types of staff development examined, formal education and front-end training (meaning seminars, workshops, conferences and short courses), particularly the group of teachers identified as best practice teachers. Specifically, they found learning on the job, discussions with colleagues, industry clients, learners and supervisors, critical reflection and networking as the most valuable aspects of work-based learning. This report recommended greater recognition of work-based learning as a major source of learning, organisational support for opportunities for self-directed learning and development of new data collection systems to assist organisations in accurately reflecting the level of activity and costs of staff development so that work-based learning is taken into account (p.62).