Contesting Competence asAustralia enters another Round of Training Reform.

Ian Hampson and Anne Junor

The University of New South Wales

Paper Prepared for the 28th International Labour Process Conference

Rutgers, the StateUniversity of New Jersey

15-17 March, 2010

Since the late 1980s the Australian vocational education and training system has gone through successive waves of reform, in an effort to create a quality system offering national vocational qualifications. Each reform round has been a response to a ‘quality crisis’ in a system marked by jurisdictional fragmentation, competing employer agendas, and (since 1996) marginalisation of organised labour from policymaking and governance. These waves are summarised, and issues arising from reliance on competency based training and assessment in the context of market-oriented training reform are analysed. Resulting difficulties are illustrated in two 2009 initiatives: the attempt to create a new internationally-harmonised qualifications framework, and the development of a framework for recognising workplace learning. Both initiatives grappled with definitions of skill level and with ways to incorporate ‘informal’ and ‘non-formal’ learning and so-called ‘generic’ or ‘employability’ skills into qualifications. Drawing on theories of workplace learning and work process knowledge, the authors’ own research-based conceptualisation of ‘skills of experience’ (Hampson and Junor, 2010, forthcoming) isused to suggest thattraining outcomes need to be understood in a context of the organisation of the labour process. The problem of defining the exact nature of human capacity that is the object of skills development, and building that into recognition structures, is a problem that confronts any national training system: how it is resolved is determined by the relative power of the social partners.

Introduction

Since 1987, there have been successive Australian attempt to shape a National Training system, out of a state-segmented pattern of funding, regulation and training delivery, within the fragmenting tendencies of a liberal market model. Each reform period was triggered by fears of skill shortages and by concerns over training quality and the integrity of vocational qualifications. The paper backgrounds the most recent attempt, since 2007, to establish a national training system. It argues that a system for the stable and ongoing generation and recognition of high-level skills will require a change of employer orientation. For well over a decade, there has been a marginalisation of the union vision of national capacity-building through skill-based career paths. Rather than ‘growing’ skills, employers have relied on recruiting a mix of contingent labour and ready-formed ‘talent’. Competency based training has tended to privilege assessment over learning, as employers have sought to ‘buy in’, ready-made, both technical skills, ‘employability’ skills – the capacity to function in the workplace that has become a precondition for employment. Yet much of this is work process knowledge, acquired, often collectively, in situated contexts (Lave and Wenger, 1990; Brown and Duguid, 1991; Boreham et al., 2002). Whilst welcoming present efforts to set up a national qualifications framework that will regulate quality and assist workforce development through a stronger skills recognition architecture, the paper argues that the new framework will fall short of clarity in conceptualising skill levels, until ‘skills of experience’ are better defined.

The first section of the paper outlines, from an institutional and policy perspective, a succession of efforts to forge a national VET system in Australia, and draws out the antecedents of the present restructure, which is outlined in the second section. The third section highlights theoretical difficulties within the concept of behavioural competence, and their practical implications for the problem of assessment. The fourth section draws on the authors’ research (Hampson and Junor, 2010) to suggest that there is still an inadequate classification of the process skills currently referred to by terms such as ‘soft’ or ‘employability’, and also that there is a need to differentiate two conceptualisations of skill level that are at present being run together – occupational skill level and level of practical expertise. The fifth section is a critical examination of how these difficulties have been addressed in new proposals for restructuring the Australian Qualification Framework, and for recognising workplace learning. The concluding section suggests that successful training reform will depend on a willingness by employers to organise the labour process in a way that allows workers to develop autonomous and collaborative skills, and to apply this learning in jobs and job sequences that draw on and build this skill development.

Early Reforms: Development and Fragmentation of a National VET System in Australia

The Australian VET sector is located in the ‘varieties of capitalism’ literature at the ‘Anglo’ end of ‘liberal market’ training systems, although Bosch and Charest (2010, p. 3) caution against too functionalist a reliance on typologies, reminding us that Australia once had an apprenticeship system in which unions had some influence. Cooney and Long (2010, p. 27-28) identify ‘segmentation’ as the defining characteristic of the Australian training system. Hampson and Morgan (2009) use the terms ‘institutional ‘inadequacy’ and ‘decomposition’ to describe Australia’s failure to develop a stable settlement around training policy. This has resulted from three factors: structural features of Australia’s government; the strategies of Australia’s employers and their organisations; and (particularly since 1996) the marginalisation of organised labour from training regimes.

Development of a national approach to training policy and governance has been impeded by jurisdictional competition. Australia’s federal system of government, has historically allocated most power over training and education to five states and two territories states. Thus each state has had its own Technical and Further Education (TAFE) system, and its own State Training Authorities. Their sometimes very different approaches to training policy have hampered national portability of qualifications. Still, since the 1980s state systems have been increasingly reliant on federal funding, while ‘deregulation’ (market-based regulation) has resulted in an even more fragmented, employer-led VET system (Cooney and Long, 2010, pp. 27-28). Employers too have divided interests regarding training, as the structure of their interest representation underscores. The 100 largest firms, mining and finance capital, are represented by the Business Council of Australia (BCA), which has sought to preserve employer prerogatives over training. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) has a larger constituency of medium to small capital more focussed on manufacturing, and dependent on the public training system.

Before the 1980s, training was mainly built around the trades apprenticeship model, in which young, usually male, apprentices served their time under tradesmen, usually unionised, and attended technical colleges. Unions and the industrial relations system restricted trade entry and helped regulate the quality and content of training and assessment. Awards (Australian industrial instruments which regulate the conditions of work) preserved industrial demarcations along skill based lines. Workplace training was often unsystematic, cursory and dangerous. In 1983 unions entered into ‘corporatist’ arrangements for the first time, under an ‘Accord’ with the Australian Labor Party (ALP), As economic liberalisation and ‘reform’ progressed through the 1980s and the need for industrial dynamism became uppermost, three issues emerged. A genuinely national qualifications structure was required, to support national labour mobility (OECD 1988). There was a need to upskill workers to utilise new production concepts. With the growth of service employment and increasing female employment, women and wage-restrained workers sought skill recognition as a means of pay equity and upward labour market mobility.

By 1987 ‘Accord’ arrangements included negotiations for a ‘National Training Reform Agenda’ (NTRA) (Hampson, 1996). Unions proposed a national training fund, into which employers would contribute, and draw from for structured training (ACTU/TDC, 1987). This was subsequently implemented through a ‘training guarantee levy’, which was poorly supervised, resisted and abused by employers, and abandoned in 1994. The NTRA included competence-based training as a central plank. Those who implemented it saw it in an industrial context as a way of delivering skill-based wage rises and career ladders, without worrying about its pedagogical implications (Ewer and Ablett, 1996). Qualifications would be awarded on the basis of Competency Based Assessments of work performance to the level defined by industry standards. They would be integrated across the economy through an Australian Standards Framework (ASF), ensuring labour market mobility (Ewer et al., 1991, ch. 7). A new National Training Board (NTB) would oversee this system, known as the National Framework for the Recognition of Training (NFROT).

A nationally integrated training system did not, however, come to fruition. Large employers in particular resisted and undermined the requirement to spend on training, and the incursions into their prerogatives implied by union involvement in training. The NTB lacked the authority to impose ‘national’ training requirements on recalcitrant state governments as well as on employers. Moreover, after one important realignment of minimum rates in male and female dominated industries in 1987, the industrial relations system itself fragmented: from 1991 unions increasingly turned their attention to enterprise-based productivity bargaining (Ewer et al., 1991; Junor, 1998).

Meanwhile high youth unemployment resulted in recommendations for a national system of traineeships, designed to provide on and off the job entry-level training at the two lowest qualification levels, articulating into higher-level training (Committee of Inquiry into Labour Market Programs 1985). In the face of slow traineeship take-up and recession, there were proposals in the early 1990s for universal vocational preparation based on pathways through combinations of school, VET and employment. Seven key vocational competencies, were proposed, defined at three levels (for example teamworking, problem-solving, communication) (Employment and Skills Formation Council 1992). Meanwhile under ‘Working Nation’ policies. employers were offered generous subsidies and the right to pay ‘training wages’ on condition that they provided nationally-recognised ‘structured training’. In reality, this could be ‘supervised practice’, indistinguishable from cheap labour (Campbell, 1994, p. 15).

The 1993 establishment of the Australian National Training Authority (ANTA) began a new stage of national regulation. ANTA was governed by a Council of Ministers of Education, Training, Employment and Youth Affairs from state and federal jurisdictions – a cumbersome governance structure that was nevertheless necessary for managing inter-state rivalries After 1994, state TAFE systems competed for contestable federal funding with private ‘registered training organisations’ (RTOs) – in-house or for-profit providers of training and assessment. Emergence of this training market necessitated national regulation and quality assurance of competency-based assessments and qualifications. Accordingly, the states agree to mutual recognition of qualifications.

An employer-led, market-based national training system developed further from 1996 to 2007, under a Liberal-National government. Industry Training Advisory Bodies (later, Industry Skills Councils), which were increasingly employer-dominated, developed training packages. These specified competency standards - statements of training outcomes, setting out required standards of performance. They also identified qualificationsto which the competency standards might contribute. Finally, they included assessment guidelines. Thus training packages contained no specific guidelines on learning and teaching. This role was delegated to the RTOs. Indeed some private RTOs offered assessment services only. As the quality of both training and assessment emerged as an issue, from 2000 ANTA used an Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF), in endorsing the training packages.

The Liberal-National government created New Apprenticeships, negotiating with the states tointegrate traineeships and apprenticeships within the AQF and covering both by training packages (Cooney and Long, 2010, p. 48). Between 1996 and 2003, traineeships grew by 300 per cent, reaching double the number of apprenticeships (Brooks, 2004). Whereas traineeships had originally been envisaged as providing Certificate I and II level training as the basis for labour market entry and further training, by 2003 they were taking the form of specialised, sometimes organisation-specific, Certificate III qualifications, in fields such as transport and storage, hospitality, retail, and health and community services. By 2003, of over 1.3 million total VET enrolments inside the AQF, just under half were evenly divided between Certificate I-II and Certificate III levels, and just over 20 per cent were evenly divided between Certificate IV (the traditional tradesperson level) and Diploma level or higher (Cooney and Long, 2010, p. 39). By 2005, slightly more than half of all training contracts were held by women, and 20 per cent were held by people aged 45 and over (Cully, n,d, but 2006, p. 24). Traineeships were not addressing their original purpose: 15 per cent of 15-19 year olds were still outside full-time employment or education.

Employers were significant beneficiaries of the 1996-2007 changes. By 2004, annual transfers of public funds to an estimated value of $750 million were going to employers, through a combination of incentive payments, wages bill savings (the training wage was below the minimum wage), and access to ‘User Choice’ allowing them to negotiate arrangements with a preferred RTO (Cully, n.d. but 2006, pp. 8, 13). A 1998 rule change allowed employers of people already employed to claim government training incentive payments, and by 2003 one-third of traineeships were going to existing workers (Dumbrell, 2004, p. 13).

In this training market context, the AQF was used to secure a degree of national consistency within each VET qualification, and also to differentiate qualification levels. But without a basis in training duration or identification of required skill sets, it was hard to establish equivalence across industry fields and education sectors. The number of AQF qualifications expanded from 12 to 15, because of difficulties in aligning new qualifications with existing ones (Cooney and Long, 2010, pp. 30-31).

Schofield, in reviewing traineeships in three states, found a number of strengths but also significant problems with User Choice and shortfalls in employers’ and RTOs’ ‘legal and moral obligations to apprentices and trainees’ (Schofield 2000, Vol. 1, p. v). High non-completion rates were attributed to poorly supervised training, wholly on-the-job ‘training’, and exploitation through excessive hours and unpaid overtime (Dumbrell, 2004, p. 22).Training access for Australia’s large casual and contingent workforce remained a problem (Hall et al., 2000).

By 2000, the marketised system was beset by reports of system-rorting by some private RTOs (non-existent facilities, sub-standard resources, visa scams, issuing of false qualifications), brought to light in a Senate inquiry (SEWRSBERC, 2000; Schofield, 1999, 2000). The politicisation of these concerns led the government in 2001 to reengineer the regulatory system by creating an Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF), and introducing new quality assurance standards for use by State Training Authorities in registering and auditing RTOs. Ongoing problems with the integrity both of qualifications and of training provision led to the establishment in late 2005 of a National Quality Council (NQC) as a committee of the federal-state Ministerial Council for Vocational and Technical Education (MCVTE). Bringing together nominees from industry, unions, governments, equity groups and training providers, the NQC had decision-making powers in the endorsement of Training Packages, and a wide quality assurance advisory role.

Thus by late 2007, persistent concerns about quality, equity and coordination had arisen in the Australian training system Nevertheless a series of high-level and OECD reviews had reaffirmed the value of industry-developed, nationally recognised qualifications linked to the AQF. This ultimate endorsement remained, even in a highly critical 2008 OECD ‘external’ review of the Australian training system. This review found that there were serious problems with training packages. which had become ‘long and complex’, and were unable to be adjusted quickly in response to occupational and industry change (Hoeckel et al, 2008). Thus even critical reviews reaffirmed the role of training packages, provided they were reworked to recognise shifting industry boundaries and reach people without jobs, and as long as they improved pathways, and above all, were streamlined (Schofield and McDonald, 2004; Hoeckel et al., 2008). In the first two years of the new Labor government (2008-2009), how have these concerns been addressed?

Reform in Australia since 2007: A New Integration?

The new government has foreshadowed bold changes.The December 2008 Final Report of the Bradley Review of Australian Higher Education recommended that the Australian government assume full responsibility for the regulation of both VET and HE by 2010, with a common regulatory and quality assurance agency covering both sectors (Bradley, 2008).

Beginning in 2008, steps to consolidating a real national system were taken, through new governance structures and compacts with the states. In April 2008 COAG agreed to a new Ministerial Council for Tertiary Education and Employment (MCTEE), covering both the VET and Higher Education (HE) sectors, with the stated purpose of achieving better articulation between the competency-based VET and merit-based HE systems. A renewal of active labour market policy saw the development of compacts with young people and retrenched workers. Whilst market-oriented and industry-led logics remain, there was a renewed focus on the use of nationally planned workforce development targets to address skills shortages, business cycles, and productivity and equity objectives. These objectives were pursued in 2009-2010 through National Partnerships based on the Productivity Places Program, and through a two-year $6.7 b. National Agreement for Skills and Workforce Development. This was based on the Bradley 2020 target of halving the proportion of 20-64 year olds with qualifications below Certificate III, and doubling diploma and advanced diploma completions.

The planning role was assigned to Skills Australia, a new statutory advisory body established by legislation early in 2008. In March 2010 its Australian Workforce Futures: A National Workforce Development Strategy, set six targets for building a skilled, sustainable and inclusive workforce (Skills Australia, 2010). Skills Australia also tackled the long-running question of the governance of a national training system. A September 2008 Discussion Paper,produced a flow-chart of current structures (a slightly simplified version is reproduced as Figure 1), in order to argue that ‘governance arrangements could currently be considered congested’ (Skills Australia, 2008, p. 6). A follow-up governance paper, Foundations for the Future (Skills Australia, 2009) recommended the eventual merging into a new single regulator of the NQC and the National Audit and Regulatory Agency (NARA, recently created to manage cross-jurisdictional quality control). This was in line with the Bradley proposal for the gradual integration of the national regulation of VET and HE, once consistent national frameworks are in place. It is too early to say whether these proposals will address VET sector institutional ‘inadequacy’.