TAFE teacher qualifications

1. TAFE teacher qualifications Erica Smith University of Ballarat

2. My sources of evidence • Retail industry background • Casual TAFE teacher and course co-ordinator late 80s & early 90s • VET teacher training academic from 1993-2008 at Charles Sturt Uni, on the largest VET teacher-training program in Australia. • Convenor then assistant convenor of AVTEC (Australian VET Teacher Educators’ Colloquium) from 1999-2009. • State ITAB Director 2000-2002 involved in development review and implementation of TPs. • On national Steering Committee for TAA Training Package 1999-2004. • President of AVETRA where much current concern is about VET teacher qualifications • A series of research projects on competency-based training, VET teacher training and teaching qualifications 1994-2008. • 2009 Service Skills Australia-funded project on workforce development for Service Industries VET practitioners.

3. What’s been happening? • The introduction of competency-based training and the general lifting of standards within industry has led to greater demands on VET teachers. • Funding issues in VET as in all sectors of education have required all VET teachers to take on more responsibility and work harder. • The encouragement of competition in VET and the growth of new markets has created diversification in the VET & the growth of new types of job both within the private VET sector and within TAFE. • A focus on assessment and AQTF compliance has diverted attention from pedagogy, yet pedagogy is what most teachers, learners and employers are interested in. Many VET practitioners are pedagogy-free and give VET a bad name. • The introduction of Cert IV teaching qualifications has provided a floor-but also a false ceiling. The industry (TAFE and other VET) has not responded appropriately to this. There will be a lack of educated managers in the near future.

4. The nature of VET practitioners From the Service Skills 2009 New Deal Project: • 75% of Service Skills RTOs said that over half their teachers had the Cert IV as their highest teaching qualification, of whom one-fifth said that the Cert IV was the pre-2004 BSZ, not TAA. Commercial RTOs were the most likely to have a high proportion of teaching staff with university teaching qualifications. • Discipline/industry quals were higher: only 35% of RTOs had 50% or more of staff with Cert III or IV as their highest discipline qualification. Variations among industry area. • Excluding schools that were RTOs, only 6% of RTOs had over half their staff with a university degree in teaching; 16% of RTOs had over half their staff with a university degree in their discipline area. • Thus teachers are much worse qualified in pedagogy than they are in their industry.

5. Four main issues • The inadequacy of the Certificate IV to provide the skills and knowledge that 21st century VET teachers need, even to start with – ANY Cert IV and THIS Cert IV. (eg no grasp of the nuances of CBT). The lack of appropriate people to teach the Cert IV - a vicious circle. • A sense of an anti-qualification and anti-university (and pro-RPL) culture within TAFE. • The failure of TAFE and other RTOs to demand better qualified teachers. • The low status of VET teaching as an occupation.