Thank you Susie and welcome. We're going to split the presentation between slides managed by Leela and words supplied by me. It's not the most felicitous organisation but we'll do what we can. Let me just explain very briefly the order of discussion that I'm following. First the emphasis of the conference is on quality and I think the point's been underlined in particular by Geoff that as growth in VET in schools gets bigger and bigger and bigger, the issue of quality gets more and more critical. So we need to know what constitutes quality. That is a really fundamental question, if we're not to betray the efforts of teachers and the aspirations of kids themselves.

How do we know what quality is?
Two approaches we can adopt, which I hope to follow here very briefly, look at some historical contrasts.
· Past VET, today VET, what kind of difference do we want to make?
and then
· look at VET in the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE), and because I've got a lot of experience with that, I feel confident that we can pursue the quality of VET through that program.

Past VET
So let's begin, with old VET. I don't want to take a superior attitude to the past. We need to be very careful when we look at past VET. But looking at these two slides which I pinched from the ministers' reports from the 1960s, what strikes us, in the upper panel, we're looking at a one purpose technology. We're trying to fit the person to the function, not the other way around. Fit the person to the function, what does that mean? If you take away the function, where's the person? Where are the typists today? The function is going to disappear, that is the nature of our economic and technological society. We can't prepare people in this way any longer, however valid it may have been 30 years ago. The problem isn't just with the narrowness of the technology, the problem is also the narrowness of the roles. It's not enough to have 'you beaut' technology. We have to train people to perform a variety of very different roles, we need multi-roles, multi-functions to protect people and to make them really productive.

Take a look at the lower panel, here we have domestic arts training. Girls secondary schools as they later came to be called, were opened in 1928. Here we have training which is narrowly context bound. Another fatal effort, unrealised perhaps at the time during the Depression, or just on the eve of it, when these schools were created and very traditional. The training is extremely limited and the individual is tied to the context from which she normally cannot really escape. Gender is a big issue in VET and this historical example should not be overlooked. If you tie the person to the context, in particular to a domestic context, they are not free to move into other contexts and they become totally reliant on the quality of the environment within the context. So, if family relations deteriorate, if community or region collapses, those people are gone.

So we have to have a VET, which enables people to steer into numerous contexts, and away from this narrow base either of role of technology or of context. I've summed it up here in my little notes, in a perhaps too harsh way, but old VET was a servant of servants. If you think of the emphasis that other speakers have so far put on entreupreneurialism, you will recognise that ultimately, our goal is to foster economic independence. We're not all going to become entrepreneurs, but we must be mobile. We must never be in a situation where we depend on a single employer, or a single firm. Think about improvements in the apprenticeship system and the move, which is now quite old, towards group apprenticeship and you will know what I mean. VET must promote economic independence.

First postwar efforts to mainstream VET in the VCE
Lets move rapidly along, thank you Leela, to our first efforts in the post war to mainstream VET in the VCE, thanks. (pause) This is one of these obscure charts that I have drawn from the educational outcomes survey. I've divided the VCE as it was five years ago into five main program streams:
1. Science,
2. Business,
3. Health,
4. a Traditional Humanities area
5. and finally the Arts and Technology cluster.

To the left you have girls, to the right you have boys, I ask two questions:
1. What's the possibility of getting a tertiary offer from within a particular curriculum strand in our integrated certificate?
and
2. What's your average tertiary entrance rank, which is represented by the line series?

Now what you see is, as you move from the high status, high prestige area of science, including biological science, down to the low prestige, we thought of it afterwards strand of Art and technology, you find the probability of getting no tertiary offer at the end of thirteen years of schooling, getting up to around 40 %. Why bother applying? When your chances are…and if we broke out some of the subgroups within this it exceeds the toss of a coin. Why bother? Where is the incentive to work, to study, when you have such a high risk. I know some of you will say:
'it doesn't matter they get jobs.'
Do they get jobs? Who knows…whether they get jobs?

Given the correlations between achievement, student attitudes and employment, it is very unlikely that this group are going to have stable employment when they leave school. What we did in the 1980s and into the early VCE, we were good on design, we had some nifty areas, particularly in the technology area, on the design side, but we just forgot about how the subjects would be used, by whom, and what outcomes would flow from them. We just had an academic approach and I will be underlining the weaknesses of that shortly. The big loser was technology. The kids in the bottom stream are not only missing out on tertiary places and would have unstable employment, if you ask them about their attitudes to life and to themselves, you find that just as they're in a relegation stream, they also have a fairly dim view of their own potential, and of their school experience. Here we ask for kids to pick an image of school, and they had a whole range of images, all in the language they themselves used. Only one bad image, prison. And you'll notice that as you go from the extreme left of what you see, which is the science stream, down to arts and technology, the number of self declared prisoners in school grows astronomically. And they're not mucking around, they're not being nasty, they have chosen this image to describe their experience of negative confinement. Over 40% of year 12 students in our Queensland survey, say they don't want to be at school, they want to be at work but they are in school. And here we have a mass of prisoners and by implication their teachers are jailers, which is absurd - but this is the reality when the teenage labour market collapses. All the effort goes into the schools and they become accountable. Now what do they become accountable for? They become accountable for economic outcomes and this has a major implication for our thinking about programs. Thank you.

Summing up on weaknesses of curriculum planning in the 80s
Lets try to sum up briefly on the weaknesses of our curriculum planning approach in the 80s and I'm not again trying to be superior with hindsight, what were those weaknesses?

We designed programs without imparting to them a transition rationale. We thought that if we built the mind, we wouldn't have to think about the destination. We were stuck on diffuse cultural effects. We stress conceptual growth over skills acquisition because we're academic and we believe in the mind, and we're right to believe in the mind, but it depends on what group you're dealing with and what timing you can provide that group. And if that group is heading for work, conceptual growth is not enough. We stress research and design skills over the ability to manage routine tasks. We just finished a survey of employers of TAFE, Diploma, and what we now call Advanced Diploma students and University graduates in engineering, science and business, its remarkable, the one area of skills acquisition that the employer does not really consider important is research skills and report writing, they get low marks by the employers. But turn to university academics and senior teachers in secondary school, what do they emphasise? Research skills and report writing. There's a big split there. I'm not saying one party is right or wrong, but certainly there's some diminished communication. There was no real industry input into the design of the vocationally oriented VCE studies.

Work placements were not included and we still have a problem with structured work placements, especially in the country. There was no integration of studies over the whole program. You took from the menu that was on for your school, subject to cancelling. The most unhappy kids as far as careers education and guidence in Australian schools are those who are the closest to leaving school, the ones who will be going into a job. They have deep distrust of the value of careers education and counselling. I understand the position of careers teachers, it is a very awkward one, for the position of the kids closest to the labour market is that they're getting the least product.

Finally we didn't really monitor until very recently what was happening to kids as they left, so we couldn't really say how good the program was. We just assumed that it would produce good results. Kwong made a point about what lies underneath a retention statistic believe me, it's not a pleasant sight. There's a statement from Carl Jung who says
"We should avoid looking to closely at the subconscious mind"

and that applies also to educational statistics. The deeper you dig, the more disturbing it becomes and the more important it is for us to be clear-sighted about which way we're going. (Can't see any longer with my glasses on). To me the big failure, and we're still very much in that mould is that we failed to build overt economic benefits into our senior certificate, we failed to do that. We remained academic in our orientation and still today in our survey for the Australian Research Council, nationally we find about only half of all teachers are confident about the place of VET in senior school programs. Kwong underlined this point in a nice moderate way but its an alarming fact and it adds to something that Geoff Spring said before, if you take away the supplementary funding, you'll expose the full extent to which we depend upon cultural change. And many programs will collapse because the underpinning of attitude isn't there. And what do we need to change our attitude is to say look, the purpose of the curriculum is not just to limit diffuse cultural change or improvement in the student. The purpose of the curriculum in the absence of strong economic institutions for teenagers is to deliver tradeable economic capital. Absolutely fundamental.

VET in the VCE
Now let's look at the VET in the VCE, thank you Leela. I've gone through this and I'm reusing this slide kept from our last presentation to underline what the twin objectives of VET in the VCE are.

The first one:
build economic strength into our programs - fundamental. We could have a whole conference about what that means. But hold those options open for tertiary studies. Flexibility is absolutely fundamental. So we want kids to leave school with training that they can actually use when they leave school and not on certain assumptions that, oh yes but we'll have more training later. Employers want kids flying when they hit the ground, they want productive people and the only way they're going to get productive people is if the kids have had experience in the workplace, they've had industry endorsed training and they are confident about themselves. Really fundamental. Here's a list of economic strengths, one person's view of what they are and it's meant to be a guide to achieving quality in our programs. We need:

• the vocational skills, stop running away from them and they shouldn't be diluted, the point of a vocational program fundamentally is to get a job. Self-esteem depends on it.
• Obviously the work placements and too much work placement is, pardon the expression, trivial, and is said by students to be trivial.
• The generic competencies and basic skills are fundamental there can be no question of substituting vocational training for cognitive growth. They have to be delivered together hand in glove.
• We have to build positive personal attitudes. Kids lacking in confidence and conviction about themselves get done. The kids who get jobs at the moment in the VCE, it's a linear function of achievement, the more marks you get in the VCE, the more likely you are to have a job while you're doing the VCE. As you go down the scale of achievement, confidence erodes, evaporates, and you get kids who cannot sell the strength they've got. So that has to be billed as an explicit learning objective and it's not trivial.
• We talked about careers education and guidance as a big challenge for us.
• We need a smooth transition to TAFE, it's time we got away from the nonsense about selection by scoring for TAFE, we need more courageous attitudes from TAFE Institutes, something we'll be discussing at the end of the month
• and we need to keep open options for university, we cannot run too far ahead of parents' aspirations, they are narrowly fettishistic because they're frightened.They only believe that, one Catholic school I was at last year, I was told about their superb transition results, I thought I'd be proud to be running this school, it's fantastic. Congratulations I said, this is a fantastic effort for an extremely disadvantaged community who get hammered into the floor academically. No, the parents are not happy because all the effort is going into northern metro TAFE. They're not going to the University of Melbourne. Hopeless attitude - but that's what the teachers have to work with, so it's the long and painful process, the parents are not snobs, they're just frightened. And they're going to be frightened so long as they don't have confidence in the economic strengths and the value of the alternative programs we're constructing.

Let's look quickly at VET in the VCE. Here I've just put some of the destinations data, and I won't go through them in great detail. But it shows that this program which the department has monitored and I think that was courageous and extremely important for it to have done so, because it could have backfired. What would have happened had there been lousy outcomes? This is based upon, I think 2600 students who we tracked through, often by telephoning. The results are really impressive, and they're getting better. My own hunch was, a year or so ago, that as the program grew, the benefits would fall, because schools were getting on the bandwagon, there was some manipulation, a broader range of students were being involved, less motivated, less committed, inexperienced teachers, lacking of resources and so on but no, it has gone from strength to strength. What impresses me is the flexibility of the pattern, even the kids who are offered places in TAFE and university and decline them, and you would think that's suicidal in this climate, they land on their feet in jobs, we know because we've rung them up, and they can land on their feet because they did a vocational program. So these are the things we've really got to communicate solidly.

Just three points:

1. we had multiple valued destinations
2. they're not all equally valued and
3. they're not all equally terrific.

There are some concerns, there is some unemployment, there's some part-time work without training, why? When we talk to the students, they are very, very positive and they don't have to be, it's all anonymous. They could have bagged the program and said I got work despite the program. (I can think of university degrees that you get jobs from, despite the program. Er.. I don't wish to be sort of nasty given the Deputy Vice Chancellor's here but '…it couldn't happen at our institution'!) And finally something that makes a great deal of importance to me personally is the appearance now of what I call transfer effects. That is you get into a program that has strong economic incentives to learn and you start to take seriously other parts of the program that are less obviously economic, like at Sunshine High with English. Suddenly there is renewed interest in the work that is otherwise academic and not in a way designed for you. The transfer effects are fundamental because we have to grow the whole person we can't give up on that just because we are insisting on the economic goal doesn't mean we don't care about the whole person. So there has to be a broad program there. The question is how do you get boys in particular to take English seriously. If they don't, they'll get done in maths and they won't get jobs. It's the third most important stream of study ranked by employers.

VET today
I thought I'd finish just with another set of photos which is 'VET today' and my thanks to Claremont College in Tasmania. Unfortunately we can't get the two sets of photos on the same frame so you will have to imagine back to what we started with.

At the top we have a young lady working at a workstation. She has a mass of equipment there - some of it is actually pretty old but some of it is very new. Now she is talking to a machine which will not necessarily be industry standard but some kind of Pentium machine. Think back about the typewriter, not much conversation with the typewriter. I know, I typed up a doctoral thesis on it and it was a very one way conversation. There isn't a lot in there, there's just springs and levers and there's nothing when you mess it up, you just do it again. But the machines that this young lady has are full of intellectual capital. It can take you on, it can really challenge you to do exciting things. It can be a really daunting experience sitting in front of it (especially when they crash a file) but the point is you can grow a brain talking to that machine but you can't do much talking to an old fashioned typewriter - you can just throw it out the window and abuse it but you can't grow with it because sooner or later you will beat it but these machines are full of intellectual content and they will beat you because you are dealing with stacks and stacks of experts accumulated in it. Very important. Think about the analogy of children learning language. If they are talking to a donkey they are not going to learn a lot of vocabulary or complex syntax, it's just not required. Solid feet to kick the animal are needed but not to develop lexicon and given the connection between cognitive growth and language development you need good speech models. Similarly to grow your brains you need good equipment. You don't need only good equipment or always have to have good equipment.

The other aspect is the multi task, multi role - the girl and her coach there in the bottom panel. She's cooking not 'for her husband when he gets home. Hopefully he's in a nice mood and the kids have been reasonable'. She's cooking for an army! She can move from household, from out of that context to anywhere she likes because she can cook for an army - and it's mussels, it looks like mussels, it's going to be very nice, cooked in wine. She is developing her potential on a wide front and that's the second issue of good quality in VET - multi task, multi function - not just requiring smart technology. You can have smart technology in an office and never use it. It's the tasks that you've got to call on. We do want intelligent machines but above all you want wide context for learning. That in the end is going to deliver us mobility - remember the emphasis that has been put I think so far on this. We want to move towards a situation of empowering individuals economically. They need to be able to move, they need portability and recognition. Some will become entrepreneurs others will be salaried workers but they've got to be free to move.

So good VET has got to deliver the capacity for mobility. In the end if we get that we will get greater economic independence and we will get a stronger economy because we will have a more flexible workforce and we will reduce the self destructive behaviour that comes from being in schooling in which you are a prisoner. Thank you.

Closure (Susan Pascoe)
To Richard for the contrast that he provided us between old VET and new VET. Alerting us to some of the issues in relation to quality and to gender, the dichotomies of expectations between employers and academics and to some of the aspirations and fears of parents. In particular, Richard, I liked the Jungian caution that we don't interrogate our data too closely. On your behalf could I thank both speakers for their contributions.

Present in chat room:

[Janine]
Richard is with us now and will answer some of the questions you sent in advance.

[Justine]
Great

[Janine] Richard is re reading your question now:
"Are there any specific industry/industry sectors that stand out as supporters of vocational training with structured workplace learning for students?

If so, are these the newer 'knowledge economy' industries or those sectors where the notion of vocational training through traditional apprenticeships is well known and understood? "

[Richard]
What we do know is that there are some areas that are not as supportive as we would like especially retail. I think becaue they prefer a new apprenticeship type model to mainly school based VET. I'd say that the best way of finding this out is through ASTF to get a national picture.

About the knowledge economy industries:
A lot of our effort in VET in schools is in the IT area though of course that is mixed ie how much IT is done an what level. What I'd stress here is not so much the industries that are selling IT but the ones who are using it eg don't tartget training to IT industries but to industries that are using it eg in the finance sector such as e-commerce, small accounting firms - making use oof the the ability of students to manage database packages. Also other industries such as building trades where machines use IT, agriculture too etc

[Justine]
I guess my question was a little loaded as we currently employ a part-time school based new apprentice in IT for that very reason (more) and have been promoting this to the business community in the region who are slow to take up new technology because of lack of technical skills.

[Richard]
Very intelligent move! Your kids will solve the employers problem. The employers don't have the training and don't have time to get it.

[Janine]
Justine we need to stop there - Richard is happy for you to contact him via email later. Thanks for your input - see you online this afternoon.

[Justine] Thanks and Ciao