Standing Committee on Employment, Education
and Workplace Relations
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Submission 10
KvB College of Visual Communication
20 October 1997
Re: Inquiry into the Approriate Use of Institutes of Technical and Further
Education
Thank you for your letter of 19 September 1997 in which you invite a
submission from this college on the appropriate roles of institutes of
technical and further education; and the extent to which those roles should
overlap with universities.
There are in fact two inter-related aspects on which we would like to
offer some comments, namely
i) the complementary and supplementary roles of private providers of
technical and further education; and
ii) colleges like KVB already have overlapping roles between
their Vocational
Education and Training courses and their Higher Education courses.
Much discussion on the appropriate roles of institutes of technical and
further education focuses, by virtue of the title, on public institutions,
and yet there are many private institutions which offer a range of TAFE/VET
accredited courses. These tend to be in fields of practice which have
not historically been catered for in the public colleges, or in areas
where it is not always easy for public sector institutions to respond
to market forces.
Private colleges are also often relatively small so that they can concentrate
on pastoral care and mentoring programs. Like the better public institutions
they also provide much of their instruction through the judicious selection
of the most able current practitioners of the professions and crafts in
question. This practice gives their programs characteristics of authenticity
and credibility in the eyes of industry and commerce. This standing is
enhanced when their students are able to share in the expertise of these
skilled professionals directly in the workplace through internship programs
where they have access to the most up-to-date equipment. In turn this
situation keeps the college up to the mark in terms of the equipment it
provides on campus.
There are probably more differences among private VET providers than
between the private and public 'systems'. There is room for more cooperation
between the public and private sectors for the benefit of the students
and the communities we serve as well as to ensure that more than lip-service
is paid to the principle of competitive neutrality. An area where the
private sector is weakest is in staff development and this is perhaps
where public providers can assist. The relationship between TAFE institutes
(and all VET providers more generally) should be based on the notion
of a two-way continuum that leads ultimately to mature participation in
the workplace.
Located in the middle of this continuum are the 'professional' disciplines
which straddle the overlap between VET and HE because of their reliance
on specialised skills acquisition applied in complex and non-routing contexts
such as Design and Visual Communication. These professional disciplines
are reliant on high quality training as well as intellectually
challenging education. They also rely on 'higher order' capabilities which
include, for instance, creativity (which is the stock in trade of designers).
This college, like the best private providers of post-secondary education,
already has overlapping roles between its VET and HE courses through
an articulated suite of accredited award programs from certificate, through
diploma and advanced diploma, to a degree program. Thus all our students
are able to share in the best features of TAFE and university undergraduate
education. This rarely happens even at universities which have TAFE
divisions because of the hierarchical nature of their programs. The
issues that confuse the debate are the competition for resources and the
notion that the access to knowledge is sequential with VET on the
bottom and HE at the top, whereas they actually represent alternative
pathways which should be viewed as complementary and mutually supportive.
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