The Queensland Coordinator's conference held in May 1999, resulted in a list of issues of common concern to coordinators. This VECO online guest session will be conducted as a forum to focus on some of those issues.

Issues will be introduced in turn by a coordinator who has indicated a willingness to initiate discussion on that point. There will be some surprises in store for how we deal with some of these - all will be revealed in the fullness of time!

We can't promise the earth but out of the fun, games, deep and meaningful discussion and occasional heated debate, we hope to generate some useful resources and actions to move forward some of these issues.

  Personal to the Coordinator

• Coordinator Burnout - real or imagined? Causes? How to avoid it
• What is the prime role of the coordinator? Does/should it include school-based traineeships?
• Coordinator responsibility for OH&S?

School related issues

• Work readiness of students and school commitment to induction process
• The unreal expectations by a significant number of students (eg don't want to start at the bottom or perform menial tasks like sweeping floors, dusting shelves, making coffee)
• Mutual lack of understanding between schools and coordinators
• Coordinators from non education backgrounds can feel outside the education system and excluded to a degree
• Difficulty for coordinators gaining access to schools, principals and teachers

Employer issues

• Lack of guidelines for employers re what to do with the student
• Logbooks need to be in a language easy for the employer to understand and complete
• Assessment in the workplace being owned and shared between schools and industry

Management committee issues

The panel will be chaired by Janine Bowes, VECO Project coordinator who will introduce the issue leaders.

Please contribute to the discussion and help pool our resources!

Participating in the forum:
Instructions for participation will be given via the voced-coord discussion list. If you are not a member, why not join now.

A chance to try a new tool:
We may choose to make use of a new bulletin board tool for some topics. In preparation, you will need to register as a user.

Feel free to practice by trying out in the VECO Gymnasium topic.