Vocational Voices: Season 1, Episode 12
What next for tertiary education? Some preliminary sketches
Steve Davis (00:00)
Hello I'm Steve Davis. Welcome to this podcast for Australia's National Centre for Vocational Education Research.
Fifty years ago the Martin Report was published by the Committee on the Future of Tertiary Education, as Australia grappled with finding the best way to manage and plan pathways for higher education. In some ways, it feels like 1964 again, given the high profile of discussions about tertiary education in government, in the sector itself and in the media, from newspapers and TV shows like Q&A, as calls for higher quality and fairer access ring out against a backdrop of changes to fee structures.
Indeed, our guest today recently had her opinion piece on education published in The Australian entitled Imagine a New Landscape for Education. However, the subject of this interview is Francesca Beddie's new paper for NCVER, entitled What next for tertiary education? Some preliminary sketches.
In the discussion, I began by asking Francesca what led to this report.
Francesca Beddie (01:13)
History led to the report. It seemed to me that with all the discussions about the reform of the system and how we pay for it, it might be good to take a deep breath and look back fifty years to see what the changes and the continuities in tertiary education policy were.
Steve Davis (01:37)
And a lot of this centered around some discussions with colleagues and senior figures today in the sector. Is that correct?
Francesca Beddie (01:44)
Yes. Well, what I did was first went back to the Martin report that you mentioned, which had been commissioned by Robert Menzies, a great supporter of education, who in the early 60s, who was contemplating the same dilemma of wanting to expand higher education and also wondering how to pay for it.
In the 60s, the Commonwealth had more money and was prepared to spend more money on higher education than perhaps today is the case. So what I first did was look at the Martin Report revisited, if you like, with these contemporary issues in mind. And from my reading both of the report and then the implementation of the government's response, which was in fact the binary system of higher education that we had, that is universities on one hand and colleges of advanced education on the other, to see how, whether we could learn anything from the past.
What struck me very much was the persistence of some of the issues. And in public policy jargon, if you like, these sorts of issues are called wicked problems. Problems that are not easily solved either by a budgetary measure or, a different, ideological point of view, but which you really have great traction in terms of higher education.
One of those problems is, you might think semantic. What do we mean by higher education? The Martin Committee was the committee on tertiary education, and by it meant any education from diploma and above. And that's actually quite consistent with international definitions about education. But then they sometimes call us higher education. And I think that's one of the problems we're confronting today as we see deregulation of what they say is higher education, but which is going to affect the way other institutions like TAFEs deliver diploma and above education.
Steve David (04:15)
I think most people acknowledge funding is always going to remain a central problem and challenge. But just harking back to binary policy for a moment, has that left us with a difficult legacy? Is there still some value in that, or is thinking focused around the binary policy part of this wicked problem?
Francesca Beddie (04:37)
Well, I suppose one of the things that sparked my interest in going back is that it seemed to me that after twenty five years of Dawkins reforms which swept away the binary system and brought in what was called the unified national system, that we were actually seeing a return to a less unified system. And that was because of the persistent quest for the Holy Grail in tertiary education, namely diversity.
So that was something that the Bradley Review in the late 2000s was talking about. It was something Dawkins wanted to introduce, but the funding models actually undermined that notion of diversity so that everyone was aiming to be similar in order to get to the top of the pile, if you like.
That happened in the binary system as well, but I wouldn't say that it's a legacy that we have to worry about now. I just think it’s a good time to think again as to whether or not we need to just always think about more and more universities, or whether we have an opportunity now to consider quite different structures of post compulsory education.
Steve Davis (06:15)
With that in mind then, perhaps could you take us through some of your sketches for the future?
Francesca Beddie (06:20)
It's interesting, isn't it? Sometimes these ideas are in the ether, and the Prime Minister's just been to New York where he visited a school in Brooklyn which is practicing some of the ideas that came out of our discussions about these wicked problems.
And that was that perhaps we need to think a bit differently about where school ends and tertiary education begins. And also to try again to increase the prestige, if you like, of applied learning. So that that means that there are going to be people who, like in the Brooklyn school the Prime Minister visited, who do have a vocational interest. So they need an opportunity to go beyond year 12 in excellent tertiary education, which is perhaps not university education, but is more applied, advanced learning. Which is what the colleges of advanced education were set up to do in the late 60s early 70s.
Steve Davis (07:36)
There's reference in the paper to one example where students working through the system, some aiming to be doctors, some aiming to be nurses, some aiming to be pharmacists might be together for a lot longer of the pathway and then branch out at appropriate times. Could you talk us through that as an example of perhaps one of these future sketches?
Francesca Beddie (08:04)
So this was an idea that was put on the table when this group of people came together to discuss maybe we could problems, if you like. And I think it was influenced also by another body of work that NCVER has published over the last three years, and that work was done by Lisa Wheelahan and John Buchanan. They were looking at alternative vocational pathways and suggesting we need to consider education coupled with broader occupational activity.
The idea is that there are elements in the health industry which a doctor and a nurse and a physiotherapist need to learn. Physiology might be one example. So why not have an integrated, vertical model where people who want to serve in the health industry or work in the health industry might actually learn together.
Some might decide that after achieving a diploma level qualification, they want to go out into the workforce. Others may have decided that, yes, they want to go on and do a full medical degree. But there might also be people who want to go out into the workforce and then return because they do want, instead of practicing their profession, to become researchers. And that they might come back into this sort of integrated model and do that sort of highly sophisticated but very applied research, which is what we keep hearing Australia needs. Applied research, which drives innovation and commercial success.
Steve David (09:59)
There seems to be a transition that works smoothly from primary school to secondary school, but it's that next jump when we get into, if you like, the tertiary layers of higher education, where almost we need to be looking a little lower down that pathway as part of this opportunity we've got right now to to revisit our system. Would that be fair?
Francesca Beddie (10:23)
I think that's right. And I think that, again, talking about new mindsets means that we have to consider education as less linear and less hierarchical, that you go from one stage to the next in a straight line. And if you don't do that, then you're condemned if you like, to being less educated.
I mean, there going to be people who in year 11 have an idea of their vocational orientation. They need to have very strong fundamental education in reading and writing and so on. But they also need to be encouraged to follow that inclination.
At the moment, I think the sort of career advice that people get in year nine, year ten tends to say, well, you know, if you're bright, you should come and you should go to university. And if you're less bright, well, maybe you can take a vet pathway. That means we're not necessarily producing or encouraging the best and the brightest to go into more practically oriented areas of endeavor, even though that might be exactly where they would like it to be. But the teachers in the schools tend not to be familiar with some of those wider opportunities. Most of them have gone through that linear process and still have a fix about it.
Steve Davis (11:51)
Whereas this integrated model perhaps would lend itself to providing more resilience within students themselves and our nation's economy at the same time.
Francesca Beddie (12:02)
Well, one would hope so. I think it would also encourage. Let's take health again as an example. Doctors and nurses, for example, still have quite delineated roles, and there's a lot of resistance to overstepping the line, if you like. If they learned together, they might in fact work better together.
Steve Davis (12:22)
And finally, if you had the levers of power, what would you be doing right now Francesca? What would you like to see happening in the landscape?
Francesca Beddie (12:32)
This paper is driven by a strong desire to broaden the debate. We've got a potential revolution on the horizon. We'll have to see what happens to the ministers. Changes in the budget process. The focus at the moment is on money. And I'm not for a moment naive enough to say, don't worry about the money.
But I do think there is a tipping point, if you like here, where disrupting the whole regulation of the system allows us to think about the structure of the system as well. And so what I would like to see is people talking more broadly about how we should be educating our citizenry in the 21st century.
Steve Davis (13:29)
Thanks for listening to this podcast produced by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research. If you'd like to download What Next for Tertiary Education? Some preliminary sketches, visit our website www.ncver.edu.au.