A Critical Realist Perspective on Quality and Reform in the Australian Vocational and Education Sector: The Road Less travelled

Deborah Johnson

doi:10.25918/thesis.252

Located in the field of education, this study investigates the nature of the relationship between quality and reform in the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. The Australian VET sector is in a perpetual state of review and reform with the need for an improvement in quality, often a stated driver. In the last decade alone, over 114 reviews, papers or reports have been published on vocational education in Australia. Yet, discussions around quality continue to rage and are said to have reached a fever pitch in recent years. This qualitative inquiry steps back from the reform agenda to conduct critical realist analysis of five recent reviews in the sector. It explores paradigms of quality operating as generative mechanisms in the sector. By undertaking Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), it critically deconstructs the set of recent reviews in VET using Fairclough’s three-dimensional model for discourse interpretation and informed by William’s keyword notion. The data corpus is coded using data analysis software and through a process of coding, annotation and theming, creates a dialectical space to inform future discourse on quality in the Australian VET sector. This investigation sought to understand quality and reform in VET from a different path: critical realism . This path is a road less travelled and contributes a different, perhaps deeper understanding of the paradigms of quality at play, offering causal explanations driving reviews in VET. The research has found that disparate paradigms of quality are operating in the Australian VET sector and have contributed to the cycle of perpetual review and reform, creating tension for the sector. Further, that neoliberal policies guiding reform have resulted in the need for efficiencies which has seen a narrowing of the purpose of education in the Australian VET sector. This has also resulted in a changed shape of vocational education in three distinct ways. The number and type of courses offered has diminished, economic imperatives define curriculum content and what competencies are taught, and the mode of delivery has increasingly shifted to targeted, short, efficient delivery strategies. Quality in education has become about efficient and economically sustainable skills and practices rather than deep learning based on quality teaching informed by learning theories. Finally, the study has found that the enmeshing of neoliberal economic principles has become so intensive and pervasive that it has normalised the language that defines vocational education. Students become ‘customers’. Student needs become ‘market demands’. Courses become ‘products’ which are designed to suit business needs and take precedence over andragogy. Economic rationalisation has become so entrenched that it has swayed public opinion to the purpose, function and aims of the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector. (1) Critical realism has been abbreviated to CR throughout this thesis unless used in headings and tables, the first time used in chapters or embedded in direct quotations.

A Critical Realist Perspective on Quality and Reform in the Australian Vocational and Education Sector: The Road Less travelled

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A Critical Realist Perspective on Quality and Reform in the Australian Vocational and Education Sector: The Road Less travelled

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