VET & TAFE campusreview. com. au
One watchdog is not enough
It’ s high fantasy to think one quality regulator could oversee VET and higher education.
By John Mitchell
Before the recent federal Budget, a thought bubble popped up in the media. The thought was that the nation could save money by having one quality regulator oversee both vocational education and higher education. That is, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency( TEQSA) and the Australian Skills Quality Authority( ASQA) could easily be rolled into one body.
Of course, the idea has superficial merit. Anything is possible and this forced experiment might work. But it’ s more likely that it would be like mixing oil and water, particularly as the two sectors have different approaches to assessment: the higher-education system is normbased and the VET system is criterion-based.
As my VET sector colleague Dr George Brown commented in an earlier column,“ In the higher-ed sector, assessment can be up to the individual academic to create and implement across a unit of study or across a course. In the VET sector, there’ s some flexibility available to assessors, but assessment is very well honed and informed by the units of competence that are part of training packages.”
If academics were asked to let go of a norm-based approach to assessment, Brown said, institutional and academic autonomy would be challenged, along with the diversity of their offerings. In other words, it simply won’ t happen; academics will never forgo the independence a norm-based approach offers.
A careful analysis of the current standards for organisations operating in the two sectors shows that both have more differences than just around assessment; they have different approaches to students’ learning and definitions of quality.
As an example, the 2015 VET standards for registered training organisations( RTOs) stipulate that, regarding the first standard on training and assessment, the RTO’ s training and assessment strategies and practices, including the amount of training it provides, must be“ consistent with the requirements of training packages and VET-accredited courses and enable each learner to meet the requirements for each unit of competency or module in which they are enrolled”. This is typical of the VET standards document; the emphasis is on the training organisation complying with externally prescribed training packages and being responsive to industry.
In contrast, the current higher education standards framework, from 2011, calls on each higher education provider to include in its objectives“ the cultivation in students of critical and independent thought and the capacity for learning throughout life”. Further, higher education providers are to promote and protect“ free intellectual enquiry and expression”. The emphasis in the standards document is on the higher education provider ensuring that it maintains academic quality and integrity, not deferring to externally ordained, industry-approved training packages.
Note also the higher education use of language foreign to the VET standards: critical and independent thought, and free intellectual enquiry and expression.
A similar difference in approach is demonstrated in the recommended actions for assessment and course content. The VET standards require that assessment be“ relevant to the needs of industry and informed by industry engagement”, while the higher education standards are benchmarked against courses offered by other providers, not industry. The relevant higher education course accreditation standard requires that“ the academic standards intended to be achieved
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