Curriculum across the great divide: exploring a key problem of Australian tertiary education

ABSTRACT

Tertiary education in Australia is dominated by a division between two large systems of provision: vocational education and training (VET) and higher education (HE). Over time, these tertiary education sectors have become distinct in several respects, including the way curriculum is conceived and practiced. In VET, competency-based training operates as a system-wide curriculum model. In HE, different professions and disciplines, in addition to university requirements, directly influence and shape curriculum design. The Australian competency-based model has been politicised over the last few decades, leading to fetishisation of the standards used to guide learning and teaching in VET and fostering distinct approaches to curriculum in the two systems. Schwab’s notion of curriculum commonplaces can be used to examine teaching and learning in VET to highlight ways in which an expanded concept of curriculum could lead to a renewal of VET and simultaneously promote generative articulation between the two tertiary systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum
• competency-based training
• vocational education and training
• higher education
• tertiary education

Introduction

In the Australian context, ‘tertiary education’ denotes a bundling of two distinct and in some ways opposed systems. Each of these systems – Vocational Education and Training (VET) and Higher Education (HE) – is large, possesses its own identity and traditions, and is associated with distinctive claims about its contribution to society and the economy now and into the future. These components of the Australian tertiary landscape are not the only ones. There is also an adult and community education sector (‘ACE’ – more strongly present in some jurisdictions) and a substantial yet disparate system of commercial professional and technical education provision focused on the needs of employers. But these modes of provision are eclipsed culturally and substantively by VET and HE and certainly receive relatively little public support or recognition for their important activities.

Many with a stake in post-compulsory education have bemoaned, or commented on, the division between VET and HE that characterises tertiary education in Australia (e.g. Bradley et al., 2008; Hodge et al., 2022; Moodie & Wheelahan, 2009). Recently, researchers at Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute investigating the nature of Australia’s tertiary education system and the Australian Industry Group (AiG) noted the need for a better integrated and harmonised tertiary system (Dawkins et al., 2019; Davis et al., 2022) (an NCVER podcast with transcript) (Dawkins et al., 2023). The Universities Accord interim report makes a similar appeal (Australian Universities Accord Panel, 2023).

For governments and industry in particular, there is a conviction that the nation requires a workforce capable of operating in more flexible, innovative and competitive ways, and that the ideological, curricular and pedagogical chasm which presently runs through the publicly funded tertiary field undermines the coherent development of skills and knowledge across the life course (e.g. Commonwealth of Australia, 2023). While previous governments and industry have mostly been content to leave the two main post-compulsory education systems to serve their own constituencies in their own ways, the needs of society and the economy are changing rapidly, and it is becoming more obvious that a ‘binary’ system of tertiary provision is not serving the national interest. As the Australian Government’s recent White Paper on Employment and Jobs states:

Building a highly skilled workforce will require more collaboration across higher education, vocational education and training, industry and governments, and a culture of lifelong learning. (Commonwealth of Australia, 2023, p. 97)

The Australian Government is clearly ‘futures oriented’ in this paper and intent on building an adaptable, flexible and resilient tertiary education system that can respond to the rapidly changing needs of industries, labour markets, communities and citizens. This ambition heralds the need for major rethinking about the tertiary sector and the way it operates.

The concern is that, in this time of great geopolitical, social, economic and technological change, Australia’s divided tertiary education sector presents a barrier to individuals who need to navigate the tertiary divide during their career and lifelong learning journey. For instance, for most Enrolled Nurses (ER) wishing to become a Registered Nurse (RN) – either during their professional preparation or later – they will need to move from VET into HE on a potentially frustrating journey that is like moving from one educational universe to another, so different are the traditions, practices, expectations and identities associated with each (Logan et al., 2017). Especially frustrating for these workers is that the Diploma and Bachelor qualifications are adjacent in terms of professional trajectory, but worlds apart in terms of the purpose, design and pedagogical approach to the learning they provide. This can be particularly challenging for dual sector and other institutions offering both qualifications.

In a recent study of qualification integration in the tertiary sector, Hodge and Knight (2021) identified major differences between the VET and HE systems, specifically, differences of theory and practice relating to curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, teacher qualifications and regulation, as well as differences in funding policy and market positioning. These differences both stem from and reinforce the fundamentally dissonant identities, histories and societal roles of the two systems. Over the last 30 years, there have been attempts by Government and educational institutions to bridge these differences (e.g. Bradley et al., 2008). But, despite significant investment, these attempts have often failed to build the coherent, integrated tertiary education sector needed to support productive lifelong learning at significant scale, or the ‘ladders of opportunity’ (Moodie & Wheelahan, 2009) required to ‘bridge gaps’ and improve the lives of Indigenous Australians, individuals with disabilities and those from low socio-economic and other disadvantaged backgrounds. In this paper, we argue that a focus on harmonising curriculum across the two systems has the potential to catalyse comprehensive and lasting change for VET and for tertiary education more broadly.

Contrasting the curriculum perspectives of VET and HE

In Australia, VET and HE programs are governed by the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF), which specifies the qualifications that can be delivered at each level and the graduate outcomes for each in terms of skills and knowledge and the application of those skills and knowledge. Beyond these high-level specifications, the curricular differences between VET and HE are stark. While Australian HE curriculum architecture, content and pedagogy are similar to those seen in other Anglophone countries, such as the UK from which it largely derived (Forsyth, 2014), our VET curriculum architecture, content and pedagogy are seen as more idiosyncratic.

For example, Australian undergraduate (‘bachelor’) degrees at AQF level 7 generally consist of 24 units of study usually completed over 3 years. Some universities are moving towards standardised curriculum architecture and credit point systems for all of their qualifications, recognising that this structural orderliness will better support learning pathways between their qualifications. Beyond this, universities and other higher education providers each seek to design distinctive qualifications that align with their institutional vision and aspirations for their graduates but do not necessarily actively promote high levels of inter-institutional recognition. Universities, as self-accrediting institutions design, accredit and govern their courses locally, using processes and documentation similar to those used in other countries (Klassen, 2022). In terms of curriculum design at the program level, in most higher education providers, there is ample scope to respond directly to the knowledge and skill demands of professions and disciplines served by the sector.

In strong contrast, VET qualifications are not based on documented curriculum in the traditional sense and VET institutions as a rule are not self-accrediting. VET curriculum architecture is quite distinct from the components of HE qualifications. Instead, VET courses are specified nationally by industry-developed sets of competency standards that align with specific job roles and tasks within them (Smith & Keating, 1997). This approach is rigorously implemented with the intention that a qualification delivered by one provider will have the same outcomes as that from a different provider. A prescriptive set of rules determines the content of VET qualifications which are documented in ‘Training Packages’. These are collections of competency standards and rules for ‘packaging’ them into qualifications, smaller recognised ‘skill sets’ and even micro-credentials (Moodie & Wheelahan, 2020). To go back to the nursing example, the Diploma of Nursing is described for all VET providers in Australia in the Health Services Training Package. A ‘core’ set of competency standards or ‘competencies’ is mandated, and a number of electives listed, from which providers can choose a stipulated number to adapt their delivery to local needs and contexts. However, this choice in units of competency is limited. Moreover, the dissonance between HE and VE curriculum architecture and content makes it difficult for graduates from nursing or other occupational courses to obtain credit for their VET qualification equivalent to whole semester and years into cognate higher education awards.

Each industry served by VET is represented by a Training Package. They cover approximately 625 occupations (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2023) and each occupation by a set of competency standards within it. Competency standards follow the same format across all Training Packages and include information structured into components including ‘elements’ and ‘performance criteria’. These documents are each accompanied by an assessment-oriented statement that lists the ‘knowledge requirements’ and ‘performance requirements’, which are taken to sufficiently demonstrate the particular competency in question under specified conditions. Each competency standard is intended to capture a discrete task within a job role and, when packaged together, build a qualification that reflects a given role or occupation. Ideally, these qualifications equip a graduate to competently perform the job whose analysis informed the standards. However, as Guthrie (2009, p. 18) pointed out,

at best, written competency standards are rough and ready, though useful, guides and we should be wary of assuming that actual realities of what competence is are reflected in the words used to describe them. Therefore, it is not the words that are important but what they mean, and the extent to which what they mean is widely understood.

In higher education, professions served by that system tend to have their representative bodies and these develop standards that higher education (and other educational) institutions need to consider when they create curriculum (Klassen, 2022). However, those standards are usually far less specified and detailed than those found in Training Packages and inform rather than become the curriculum. Organisations such as Engineers Australia (EA) and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) manage professional accreditation for programs and qualifications, entitling graduates to professional recognition of their qualifications. From a curriculum perspective, the extent of the influence of occupational standards on what is taught varies considerably as academics in HE have a greater degree of ‘wriggle room’ in relation to the standards with which they generally work. Nevertheless, even in highly regulated areas – such as nursing and teaching – HE providers exercise considerable agency over curriculum as well as teaching and assessment methods. Across HE in Australia, no two nursing or teaching degrees have precisely the same outcomes, resources, teaching approaches and assessment. Representative bodies may identify a set of standards with perhaps some further specification, but these require substantial elaboration through curriculum, teaching and assessment. HE teaching staff draw on their disciplinary and/or professional expertise, often honed by higher degree research, to span the wide gap between the specifications inscribed in standards and student learning experiences and outcomes and on the whole, are trusted to do this work.

Much teaching in higher education is not governed by occupational standards, especially in the humanities and sciences. In areas like these, curriculum and teaching are informed by the identifiable bodies of knowledge that form academic disciplines (Barnett, 2009). These comprise topics, structures, debates, theories and concepts, wrapped in coherent world-views and traditions that provide tangible guidance for the creation of curriculum to prepare scientists, historians, philosophers, etc. That is, curriculum in these fields is tied to something very definite and addresses a valued body of knowledge and skills. It is noteworthy that in these curriculum areas, as well as in those subject to professional accreditation, the people creating the curriculum are simultaneously contributing to growth of knowledge in the areas on which curriculum is based (Neumann, 1996). There is a knowledge loop connecting teaching, curriculum and evolution of subject matter (whether for a profession like engineering or a discipline like sociology). Such epistemic loops have for centuries been the way experts are produced and human knowledge advances through scholarship and research. These are organic relationships, too, where forms of curriculum emerge from bodies of knowledge and skills, overseen by professional or disciplinary experts, and those forms of curriculum in turn shape the profession or discipline.

Competency-based training and curriculum

In sharp contrast, curricular form in Australian VET is something interposed between vocational expertise on the one hand, and the development of vocational expertise on the other. The interposed form goes by the name ‘competency-based training’ (CBT), which conceives competency as a binary between ‘not-yet-competent’ and ‘competent’ rather than a progressive shift from novice to expert (Smith & Keating, 1997). Deriving from theories of ‘scientific curriculum-making’ of Bobbit and Charters, popular in the USA in the 1920s and 30s (Kliebard, 1975), and formalised in performance-based and competence-based teacher education in the 1970s (Hodge, 2007), CBT provides a generic template for representing knowledge and skills that emphasises their application to given tasks and roles. This template works by breaking work into parts that are each captured in a ‘unit of competency’, as described earlier. In Australia, CBT became the form of publicly funded and formally recognised VET in the early 1990s (Guthrie, 2009) and, despite many shifts and refinements in the way CBT has been implemented in Australian VET, and ongoing criticism of its efficacy in meeting Australia’s workforce needs (for example, Billett et al., 1999; Joyce, 2019; Mulcahy, 1999; Smith, 2010; Wheelahan & Moodie, 2011), its core principles have persisted, and the contemporary system continues to divide work into instrumental tasks and base curriculum resources, teaching and assessment activities on them.

One enduring criticism of CBT has been the limitation of theoretical knowledge in competency standards which, according to Wheelahan (2010), fails to develop broader and more abstract professional knowledge bases in VET and limits the potential of students to understand the ‘why’ they need to participate fully in the debates shaping their work and in ‘society’s conversations’. Without disciplinary knowledge, students are limited to contextual knowledge, which restricts their capacity to use that knowledge in other contexts and to recognize boundaries between different areas of knowledge (Wheelahan, 2007). This limitation impacts most on students from disadvantaged backgrounds who have not had access to different forms of knowledge during their lives. Another persistent criticism has been the slow and inefficient pace of development of competency standards which leaves them at best representing work in the recent present, but more likely work of the past (Joyce, 2019; Wheelahan & Moodie, 2011). Other concerns include the gap in quality between competency standards and the way they are delivered by VET’s many thousands of providers (Harris, 2015) and that many VET graduates do not end up in the intended occupation of their VET qualification (Wheelahan et al., 2015).

However, early experimentations with CBT show that basing learning on competencies can be an effective way to devise curriculum, at least for some kinds of subject-matter. To illustrate, a trial of CBT that took place in the automotive section of an institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Croydon Park, South Australia in the early 1980s was by all accounts a successful educational experiment (Harris & Hodge, 2009; Harris et al., 1985). In this trial, teachers formulated the statements of competence. Later research revealed that the same teachers had sought to express the values and ideals of quality automotive work in these statements and regarded the competency standards of contemporary CBT as only loosely expressing an average or passable level of quality. The Croydon Park trial addressed the teacher-formulated competency standards using a ‘mastery’ methodology whereby the students (apprentices) would learn and practice for as long as they needed to be judged competent. It was also a ‘student-centred’ approach where learning resources were prepared in advance and the apprentices (guided by their employers) determined the order in which they would learn the competences. The curriculum resources used the most up-to-date production techniques, but at substantial cost. The students experienced interactive resources supported by video-based explanations and demonstrations. The teachers were in the background during learning, on hand to assist students as necessary. The student-centred character of the trial was such that the teachers involved in it did not tend to refer to it as ‘competency-based’ but rather, ‘self-paced’.

Years later, Harris and Hodge (2009) visited a contemporary private automotive teaching facility to compare CBT practices. This facility operated under the national CBT model and was noteworthy for following a ‘lock-step’ schedule where all students in a group learned the same content at the same time and in the same order, and had limited scope individually to extend their learning if they struggled with any aspect of the curriculum. The facility implemented a traditional teacher-centred approach, although there was ample scope for practical application using current automotive equipment and materials used in industry. The Croydon Park trial and the contemporary training facility both followed the principles of CBT but resulted in very different learning experiences.

The growth of ‘fetishisation’ in VET curriculum

Contemporary Australian VET not only interposes a particular curricular form – competency standards – between occupational expertise and learning for diverse industries but, due to a peculiar configuration of political factors, it fetishises those standards. They have become a focal point for the rhetoric of ‘industry leadership’ of VET, even though employer engagement with the system appears to be relatively low (Harris, 2015). The structure of CBT happens to allow the labour of formulating and teaching competencies to be neatly divided where, in the Australian form of CBT, this potential is leveraged to give industry control over the formulation of the standards, leaving the teaching or the ‘delivery’ of them to training providers and teachers, albeit within significant constraints. This division of educational labour has been strictly observed over the life of CBT in Australia.

For many years, VET providers and teachers have been excluded from the work of formulating standards, and by the same token, ‘industry’ has had relatively little to do with the delivery of competencies. But the fetishisation of competency standards goes deeper than the practice and rhetoric of industry leadership. Auditing regimes are generally strong in marketised public service delivery, and Australian VET is no exception. Auditing and compliance have become a time-consuming and dominant constant in Australian VET provision, and much of the auditing effort is devoted to verifying delivery of competency standards in exactly the way they are expressed in the documents. As Hodge and Guthrie (2019) suggest, this emphasis has made Training Packages the ‘gold standard’ that VET providers must comply with or risk regulatory sanctions. For many years, a literalistic implementation of competency standards has been rigorously policed, fostering a compliance culture among providers, arguably at the expense of delivery quality, flexibility and innovation (Guthrie & Waters, 2022). Teacher time that might be spent on continuously improving teaching and learning through practice-based inquiry and reflection is instead spent on relentless form completion and other compliance and administrative tasks.

Fetishization of the competency standards is also created through funding policies that remunerate publicly funded provision largely on the basis of the units of competency delivered. Funding policy thus serves to focus attention of managers and influences organisational policy and structures impacting curriculum (Nakar & Olssen, 2022). Competency standards are also fetishised through their appropriation by industrial relations (IR) regimes (Ryan, 2011), whereby unions and employers have found that competencies can stand as a proxy for grading the workforce in terms of level and types of skills upon which industrial awards can be based. As a result, as IR policies, practices and disputes play out in occupations covered by VET, units of competency are caught up in IR struggles that have nothing to do with developing and implementing robust curriculum, but that clearly have curricular outcomes.

The fetishisation of competency standards produced through institutionalised division of educational labour (justified through the rhetoric of industry leadership), the gaze of auditors, industrial relations machinations and through the material force of funding regimes makes the interposed curricular form of CBT a very powerful influence on the actual curriculum of individual providers and the practices of teachers and trainers. The situation for VET is that quality has been conflated with compliance in the eyes of many stakeholders, including providers and teachers, and developing occupational and personal expertise through curriculum is a convoluted process that requires contending with the fragmentary, codified information of competency standards, anticipating auditors’ demands, and juggling funding and IR rules. Taking into account actual employer needs, student diversity and teacher expertise – reference points that ideally inform a relevant and responsive curriculum – become secondary considerations when a program of learning is developed in VET. What started out as an ambitious attempt to construct an elegant engine of economic growth – a competency-based VET sector – has thus turned into a lumbering mass of rules and competing interests that can be made to function only through the highly specialised knowledge and ingenuity found only in Australian VET. Sadly, this situation inhibits creativity, innovation and nimbleness and de-professionalises and devalues teachers, especially their professional judgement, reducing both their confidence and capability development.

Across the great tertiary education divide

Curriculum is only one of the dimensions of difference between VET and HE in the Australian tertiary landscape. However, as indicated, by itself this dimension creates a very complex problem to achieving the goal of an accessible, integrated and navigable continuum of post-compulsory provision. The fetishisation of units of competency weighs heavily on the VET side of tertiary education. On the other side, although attempts have been made to impose a competency-based system on HE in Australia (Penington, 1993), each area of subject-matter (professions and disciplines) is, in a curricular sense, sovereign. This proliferation of curriculum models, each driven by the traditions and internal logic of knowledge in these subject areas, and individual institutional policies and practices, was never a matter of design. However, in light of the VET curriculum experience, it is potentially a stroke of good fortune. It means that disciplines and professions served by HE can directly appeal to, and negotiate, with providers to determine what is taught. There are rules – arising from accreditation, funding, internal institutional rules, the AQF and regulation – but none of them have quite the same direct educational impact as the competency approach in VET.

For curriculum to go from being problematic for VET to a source of innovation and enrichment for all tertiary education stakeholders, the curricular imposts of competency standards in VET need to be significantly reduced. We suggest that this could occur by renewing curriculum as a major focus of educational activity for VET providers and their teachers. A fundamental point here is that a renewal of VET curriculum could take industry-devised standards (whether competencies or some other form of skill standard) as one reference point to be balanced with other reference points, including the needs of students and local and/or innovative employers. Industry standards (like professional standards or implicit disciplinary standards in higher education) could retain a role in a renewed VET curriculum. As a fundamental category alongside teaching and assessment, an explicit emphasis on curriculum could re-establish a connection between VET and the wider world of curriculum research and enrich the knowledge base of the sector and especially of teaching.

In terms of curriculum research, Australian VET can be understood in terms of innovations of the first part of the 20^th Century, culminating in the objectives approach of Tyler (1949). What has been missed is advances in the field that include the so-called ‘Reconceptualists’ who significantly expanded the theoretical bases of curriculum and attempted to establish curriculum as a discipline in its own right (e.g. Pinar et al., 1995). A different stream has evolved around the ideas of Joseph Schwab, who argued for a ‘deliberative’ approach that has informed the work of van Manen (1977), Eisner (1984), Clandinin and Connelly (1992), Goodson (2003), Biesta (2013), Deng (2013), Craig (2020) and many others. This tradition is of particular relevance to the question of curriculum in Australian tertiary education because it arose in and responded to a period of centralised learning objectives that had exerted a powerful influence on American education. The deliberative approach acknowledges the claims of subject matter (objectives in the 1970s, competency standards in our own time), but also considers the curriculum claims of students, teachers and a broader milieu. A deliberative approach to curriculum making considers and weighs up the demands of these four ‘commonplaces’ when creating curriculum in particular settings. Suggestions about how the commonplaces might relate to Australian VET are set out below.

Subject matter

In VET at present, a particular take on subject matter dominates the task and role descriptions that comprise the content of units of competency (Hodge & Guthrie, 2019). A shift to a deliberative curriculum approach in VET would not dispense with subject matter, whether in the form of units of competency or another type of standards regime, but call for a more expansive and forward-looking conception of it. In light of a renewed focus on curriculum in VET, subject matter could still be concerned with standards. If the latter is taken to represent those aspects of an occupation or industry that are essential and valid across a whole industry, then standards would be of great interest as pointing to the bases of portability of learning, especially with regard to technical skills (Misko & Circelli, 2022).

However, as some research points out, technical skills are not the whole story when it comes to VET subject matter. In a series of works led by Wheelahan (2007, 2012, 2015), types of knowledge that are necessary to expertise in certain occupational areas were found to resist representation in competency standards. Disciplinary knowledge, for example, may be required for full participation in skilled trades but cannot be directly developed through competency-based learning. Mathematical knowledge is necessary for the work of electricians and mechanics, but the competency standards used to convey it serves to fragment the body of knowledge and leave electrotechnology students with access to parts of that corpus (Wheelahan & Moodie, 2011). Other researchers call for the development of so-called 21^st Century Skills (also referred to a ‘soft’, ‘generic’ or ‘transversal’ skills) in VET (e.g. Jones, 2018). However, here again, this is a type of subject matter prone to being fragmented through their representation in competency standards. For example, Misko and Circelli (2022) indicate that in care work, there are desirable skills that are non-technical and, again, are difficult to convey through the standards. While there is nothing stopping VET providers and teachers from introducing these areas to learners, the fetishisation of competency standards described earlier constitutes a powerful influence on provider and teacher practices, effectively precluding an expansive approach to subject matter in the sector if a risk of regulatory sanction is perceived.

An additional consideration in terms of using standards as part of the subject matter of curriculum is that outside VET, standards for different professions are each of a different nature. For example, engineering, psychology and nursing standards used to inform HE curriculum are each expressed in a way that is determined by those professions. Teacher standards reflect the way knowledge, skills, capabilities and dispositions are conceptualised within that profession. They are not commensurate with the standards for chartered accountants, both in terms of content and how that content is conceptualised. All these professional areas create their own standards that reflect epistemological, ethical and historical assumptions that are unique to them. However, within VET, the CBT model employs the same template to express all occupations served by the sector. Thus, the competency standards for creative industries, caring industries and manufacturing industries all follow essentially the same approach to breaking down and describing expertise. Different levels of expertise, from that of the least skilled labourer to the most skilled human resources leader are expressed using the same basic template. VET would need to allow different industries to express standards in ways appropriate to those industries for the standards component of curriculum to truly serve the specific character of each industry involved. Misko and Circelli (2022) make a similar case when they explain that,

The benefit of the current CBT approach to all types of vocational qualifications and at all levels is becoming increasingly questionable. A case can now be made for a differentiated training and assessment paradigm for some qualifications; for example, VET qualifications at the diploma level and above in the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF), or those in the creative and caring sectors, where personal attributes and capabilities are seen as more critical, in terms of establishing the key elements of what it means to be ‘competent’. (2022, p. 1)

Students

Along with an expanded conception of subject matter, a revitalised deliberative VET curriculum would ideally draw directly on the knowledge students bring to the learning environment. In the context of curriculum, individual learners bring different knowledges and experiences into the learning environment and, as graduates take different knowledge into workplaces, occupations and industries over time. This aligns with thinking by some researchers who have drawn attention to the value of incorporating Sen’s (1993) and Nussbaum’s (2011) capability concept into future VET curriculum design. In this sense, the capabilities are ‘… the social, economic and individual resources that are needed to support individual wellbeing, social inclusion and individuals’ capacities to make choices about their lives, how they wish to live, and the work they engage in’ (Wheelahan et al., 2015, p. 20). The latter authors have proposed an alternative curriculum model for Australian VET based on three capability domains: the knowledge base of practice, the technical base of practice and the personal attributes needed for a given occupation or profession. Other researchers have advocated for a ‘21^st Century Skills’ emphasis that again concerns what students can learn in VET but then develop and apply over time in a range of workplace settings (Jones, 2018). For some researchers and other VET stakeholders including policymakers and industry leaders, 21^st Century Skills – such as problem-solving, critical thinking, communication and teamwork and digital literacy – are the most crucial learnings for contemporary careers but may be underemphasised in the way competency standards are presently conceived and enacted. In terms of student diversity, curriculum approaches that allow a broad range of students to access subject matter such as ‘Universal Design for Learning’ (UDL) offer principles and ways of thinking that can inform VET (Leif et al., 2023). Data about VET cohorts indicate that diversity is especially evident (Myconos et al., 2018), calling for a highly differentiated curriculum that in turn calls for a sophisticated approach to design and teaching.

Milieu

In Schwab’s scheme (Craig, 2020), environment or context contributes to deliberations about curriculum, and multiple milieus may influence curriculum deliberation. This curriculum commonplace is evident in debates about the extent to which the competency standards serve local employer needs in diverse communities across Australia (Macklin, 2021). No two employers would practice their industry in the same way, and employees would always bring value to their place of work through appreciation and skilful engagement with what makes that workplace a unique site of a given industry as well as having an eye to the needs of their future working life. And just as a particular employer’s practice would be a compound of common processes and materials on the one hand and original ways of enacting them on the other, preparing new workers would call for an approach that reflects this duality. Accordingly, a broader VET curriculum approach would touch on both what can be expressed in standards and on ways that local and regional employers uniquely embody their industry. A wider milieu impacting local employers and communities, and by extension adding to the demands on curriculum in local providers are the major disruptions shaping the social and economic landscape that in turn influence industries, employers and the skills and knowledge requirements of the workforce. The White Paper on Employment and Jobs (Commonwealth of Australia, 2023), highlights the importance of the operating milieu to Australia’s VET and HE systems.

What a focus on milieu also tells us about VET curriculum is that the current competency-based architecture can be dated to an earlier time, and we know that the political arguments for the reforms that included the move to CBT were that the whole Australian economy needed to be modernised (Harris, 2015; Harris et al., 1995). The arguments for the move to CBT took into account the forces of globalisation that threatened the Australian economy. At the time, CBT was advanced as an educational model that could directly respond at scale and in a uniform way to the requirements of a rapidly modernising economy. Thousands of units of competency were created that specified the job requirements of reforming industries. Unions and employers were heavily involved in these changes and leveraged CBT to ensure workers were appropriately rewarded for developing their own skills in line with IR reform.

A case can be made that CBT was fit for the needs of those times. Thirty years on, however, the milieu of VET has changed significantly. A model that might have suited the requirements of wholesale, economy-wide, policy-driven change seems increasingly out of tune with quite a different environment in which industries are responding in more differentiated ways to fast moving and multiple disruptions that cannot be controlled or orchestrated by government fiat. Contemporary Australian policy documents recognise the impacts on the economy and society of disruptions including digital transformation, climate change and population ageing (Jobs & Skills Australia, 2023). Among other things, these disruptions are breaking down the clear boundaries and levels that were once the structuring guidelines of competency-based training packages. At the same time, the workforce is increasingly called on to demonstrate fluidity and exercise innovation at a micro level. ‘Soft’ or 21^st Century Skills (Jones, 2018) are needed in combination with technical skills rather than the prespecified sets of competencies that equipped the workers of the 1990s. The idea that curriculum is something attuned to its current milieu with an eye to the future is a significant departure from the CBT model.

Teachers

Education researchers recognise that teachers decisively determine students’ experience of curriculum (e.g. Clandinin & Connelly, 1992). Teachers are, in a sense, representatives of all the stakeholders that shape curriculum, whether governments and providers, academic disciplines, professions, industries, unions or employers and are ultimately responsible for translating curriculum into meaningful experiences and outcomes for students. Whatever influence stakeholders have on curriculum, teachers have the last say, within certain constraints. An implicit acknowledgement of this reality is reflected in institutional practices of HE where an ideal of a ‘nexus’ between teaching and research is operative (Neumann, 1996). That is, teachers are supposed to be intimately familiar with the nature of influences on curriculum. The archetypal form is of the teacher-researcher who contributes to the evolution of the body of knowledge that they teach through scholarly practice, which is fundamental to their role. Whether this ideal is realised in practice fully or in part, the fact is that higher HE practices and expectations place trust in teachers to take up the responsibilities of a representative of curriculum influences.

A strong contrast can be seen in the role of teachers and trainers in Australian VET. One of the doctrines that attended the implementation of CBT was that teachers were required to strictly attend to the ‘delivery’ of content specified in units of competency, as devised by industry representatives. This subordinate role for teachers in the reformed VET sector can be understood in the light of wholesale, regimented change but ultimately disempowered and de-skilled the teaching workforce (Hodge, 2016). The doctrine also failed to account for the realities of teaching. There is no situation in which different teachers produce the same experience of curriculum. The diverse experiences of curriculum that are produced when different individuals teach is a fact that transcends the characteristics of particular sectors, nationalities and eras. The only way to work productively with this fact is to trust teachers and to ensure they have the education, professional development, networks and resources necessary for them to assume the mantle of responsibility for providing students with the learning and development necessary to thrive in their careers. A deliberative curriculum approach in VET would thus take teacher agency into account just as it has long been assumed in HE. It could also reinstate trust in teachers, which has long been in short supply in VET.

Conclusion

For curriculum to become a generative element in a continuum of tertiary provision in Australia, then the set of constraints upon VET curriculum need to be lifted. Recognition of the educational impacts of CBT on curriculum can help identify those constraints. The fetishisation of competency standards and training packages has elevated the interposed curriculum form of CBT to a system-wide constraint on educational innovation and the ability of VET providers to respond flexibly and quickly to changing workforce needs, adversely affecting providers, teachers, students and employers. In the meantime, HE has flourished in relative terms in the absence of such constraints to the point where industry could well be thinking it will be better served by this sector.

For a true continuum of tertiary provision to become a reality in Australia, industries whose professional preparation draw on both VET and HE provision need to be able to influence the curriculum of both post-compulsory education systems in the same generative way. To return once again to the example of nursing, this is an industry that is not well served by a binary tertiary education system, but could be if its professional standards were the only standards impinging on curriculum, and if the bodies of knowledge and skills that constitute the expertise of nurses worldwide were the primary source of subject matter for both VET and HE nurse preparation courses. At present, the interposition of CBT on one part of this provision introduces a host of problems for providers, teachers and students that need not exist.

A better outcome would be to allow standards formulation to be simpler and less prescriptive, and a matter for individual industries to determine. HE and VET providers and teachers could complement this information with other subject matter, along with information about students and milieu, all guided by those with specialist educational knowledge (teachers). This approach has been effective in HE in producing engineers, scientists, historians, doctors, lawyers and many more forms of expertise and scientific advancement over time, due in part to the absence of interposed, overly prescriptive and fetishised curricular forms that have to date characterised Australia’s VET system.

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