Book review - Higher Vocational Education

Book Review by Robin Shreeve

Equity and access to high skills through higher vocational education

Edited by Elizabeth Knight, Ann-Marie Bathmaker, Gavin Moodie, Kevin  Orr, Susan Webb, & Leesa Wheelahan.  Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

This is an important work on the current state of non-university, post compulsory education and training containing analytical and system descriptive chapters by twenty-three leading, international researchers. Ultimately, its dominant message is salutary. Sue Webb points out in the opening and framing chapter that growing Higher Vocational     Education (HVE) is a response both to economic productivity issues through addressing technician level skills shortages as well as a strategy to improve social justice and equity for disadvantaged individuals wanting to gain entry to tertiary education. In both cases the results have often been less than hoped for. The conclusions of several, if not all, of the authors are summed up in these sentences in the contribution by Leesa Wheelahan, one of the most prolific and best-known researchers in this field:

Many of us researching this topic thought that higher education in colleges in these countries would grow dramatically and quickly. But it didn’t. (Wheelahan, p270)

Her explanation is that:

The key argument in this chapter is that the growth of higher education in colleges in countries with liberal market economies is limited by the increasingly marketized and hierarchical structure of tertiary education in each country and that colleges can never win in this competition. (Wheelahan, p270)

There are, however, some more optimistic views. The rather didactic chapter by Graf and Powell on German developments in Work-Based Higher Education paints a progressive picture of initiatives in that country such as the enterprise driven vocational academies. The arguments may have been more convincing if the authors had provided a range of statistics of industry coverage and enrolments. To be fair they do suggest that this might be difficult given these initiatives are not covered nor counted by either the higher education German Rectors’ Conference (HRK) nor the Federal body overseeing VET, the BIBB. The same point about statistical deficits could also be made about the contribution on the United States by Floyd, Falconetti and Camacho. They point out that many Community College type institutions now offer baccalaureate degrees for traditionally professional occupations. But as Wheelahan also points out we have a better idea of the number of degree offerings than the proportions of students enrolled in these degrees. Indeed, some of these degrees have no students. This statistical deficit appears to be a function of a decentralised system with less national statistics available than countries like Australia which has bodies like the NCVER.

But these optimistic views are not the norm. Contributions covering examples from Australia, Canada (twice - one largely about Ontario the other from Quebec), Chile and South Africa point to policy confusion and general governmental subservience to more established and autonomous universities. Typical is the admission from Bathmaker and Orr that in 2018-2019 only 2.25% of certificates awarded in the English Further Education sector could be described as Higher Vocational Education (HVE). Given national rivalries in the UK, I must point out that Gallagher and Reeve in their separate chapter on Scotland outline a slightly different situation to England. Initially at least, Scotland was keener on preserving and promoting the long established Higher National Certificates and Diplomas than England but its more centralised approach to Graduate Apprenticeships still had the consequence of promoting bachelors’ degrees.

Two other common themes emerged for me. One is the difficulty and complexity of classifying and describing this sector, or is it sub-sector? Most of the authors give their interpretations of the differences between Higher Vocational Education (HVE) and vocational higher education (as done in universities) as well as the boundaries between compulsory and post compulsory education, between further and higher education and where vocational education begins and ends. Bathmaker and Orr even point that the UK Government is replacing ‘vocational’ with ‘technical’ because the Government believes ‘vocational’ is now a pejorative term. Gavin Moodie provides a lifeline in making sense of this complexity by providing in his contribution a truly clear typology of tertiary education systems whilst acknowledging that systems vary given national economic and social circumstances. The typology is structured around two core concepts – the object of the education and its level. He identifies three classifications in each – for object they are knowledge acquisition; occupational preparation; and training. For level he identifies advanced; long cycle; and short cycle. So, in the UK system Higher National Certificates and Diplomas and Foundation Degrees largely delivered by FE Colleges would mainly be short cycle programs for occupational preparation. Trevor Gale makes some interesting observations on cognate themes in his chapter on HVE as a work of art but with possibly less clarity and accessibility.

The other common theme are the paradoxes presented by HVE – even to the extent of using the term oxymoronic. Is it counter intuitive to recognise that system expansion leading to wider participation has enhanced rather than lessened the advantages in status and prestige of elite universities? In an interesting opening chapter Webb discusses differing national equity strategies. She draws both from conceptualisations of equity developed by McCowan and a recent systematic literature review of higher education widening access strategies in which she was a major participant. McCowan argues that expansion has led to increased differentiation and stratification that can further advantage the privileged rather than the under privileged – both institutions and individuals. I remember my surprise on returning to London in 2005 to hear at a London Universities meeting universities voluntarily describing themselves as either ‘selecting universities’ or ‘recruiting universities’ which just reflected whether they had been Polytechnics prior to 1992. Webb examines in some detail McCowan’s notion of the impacts of the ‘availability of places;’ ‘accessibility to places’ and the ‘horizontality’ of the system in terms of institutional differentiation

My other observations on this work reflect my own background as a practitioner having been the CEO of a number of VET institutes and skills agencies mainly in Australia but also in England. More recently I have been a University College Board member and workforce development consultant on large scale infrastructure projects. I have always been an avid reader and funder of vet research.

First, I wonder if there could have been even more discussion in the articles about the perceived and actual differences in the pedagogy between HVE Institutions and traditional universities. Hodge, Knight, Rawolle and Webb address this directly in their comprehensive section on Australia. They stress the emphasis on working with the individual student rather than the traditional university mass lecture. This contribution and others including those by Papier and Orr about South Africa, Skolnik on Canada (Ontario), Graf and Powell especially on Germany and Gale in general all raise at length the differences between practice, science, and theory with the emphasis in HVE being on practice. Papier and Orr point out that TVET teachers are most often recruited from the ranks of practitioners. They are less likely to have a research background or a research degree like a doctorate than traditional university lecturers. Even when they do are they still “research active”? When I ran a TAFE institute proposing to run degrees we found many staff with masters’ degrees, a few with doctorates but very few of those still research active. Does this matter? Gale questions the perception of TAFE degrees as “equal to” those from traditional universities. If a lack of “research active” staff means they are not it could be a disadvantage to TAFE graduates wanting to pursue a higher degree at a traditional university.

Questions of pedagogy and practice raise questions to me about whether some of the authors have underestimated how much traditional universities have changed in this and other areas, given massive expansion in most countries in recent years. Pandemics, as with other massive shocks like war, result in monumental change such as in tertiary education that now has a far greater emphasis on flexible and online learning. My own experience with a University College in one of the less affluent areas of Sydney is that its student cohort is remarkably like what I experienced for over 30 years in TAFE and FE. Its pedagogy is far more like TAFE than my own traditional university experience thirty-five years ago. This college is “owned” and operated by the university from university premises. It has far more Diploma level students than local public and private VET providers. The fact that it is called a college maybe worthy of further study.

Second, my admittedly limited experience with civil engineering contractors, would lead me to question whether there are large scale shortages of Diploma qualified technicians at least in that branch of engineering. All the large multi-national contractors I met with had large trade apprenticeship and university cadetship programs. We asked them whether they wanted to have also advanced level apprenticeships at the Diploma level. Their answers were universally negative. They saw no need, though this might have been influenced in the Australian context by industrial relations considerations. Their overt answers were about the now plentiful supply of university graduates and changes brought about by automation. In the past, these firms would have employed floors of Diploma qualified technicians in drawing offices. This work was now done as part of the duties of a small number of degree qualified junior engineers using the latest CAD/CAM software – a huge productivity gain. University expansion has made supply more plentiful, partly because these degrees are popular with international students seeking to migrate to Australia.

Third, I wonder if enough is made about who controls the system. Most authors acknowledge the advantages enjoyed by universities through their autonomy. Graff and Powell point out that industry associations and trade unions were principal players in traditional German VET. Enterprises are driving the new developments. Hodge, Knight, Rawolle and Webb in their contribution on Australia point out how VET over the last twenty-five years has become “industry led” to the exclusion of Educationalists from major decision-making forums. Yet industry and government still complain about VET even though they have been in charge over recent history. This is a quite different scenario to that found in Australian Universities.

So, this is an important if somewhat confronting contribution to those who saw the growth of HVE and non-university tertiary institutions as a solution to both social equity and economic productivity. Its analysis is razor sharp as one might expect from the distinguished contributors. One can hope successful initiatives in HVE outlined here will continue and grow. Elsewhere we need to rely on expansion of the university sector and ongoing change in their approaches to social equity addressing these critical issues.

Robin Shreeve, Adjunct Professor Federation University Australia. Formerly CEO of North Coast Institute of TAFE, City of Westminster College, Western Sydney Institute of TAFE-OTEN and Skills Australia