The changing balances of equity, control and market choice in the Indigenous vocational education and training sector

Abstract

The rationales and related programs for delivering vocational education and training to Indigenous Australians have seen significant change over the past 40 years, with several influential reviews marking policy pivot points along the way. Commencing with the 1960s Martin Review, the implementation by governments of selected recommendations have led to structural reforms and the creation of public policy instruments to monitor, regulate and control access to vocational training. These activities have heavily impacted Australian Indigenous people for whom certificate level qualifications are disproportionally the highest level of post-school education held. In the 'thin' markets of regional Australia, in particular, the authors of this paper argue that the changing priorities in training policy have systematically perpetuated inequity of access to, and benefit from vocational education and training, contrary to the original conception of a national post-secondary technical and further education system for Australia. Marketisation of the training sector and the transfer of funding responsibility from the public purse to the individual student/ worker have produced low rates of employment and high training attrition rates for Indigenous people. We argue that this arises from a fundamental shift in the meaning of equity itself which morphed from being considered a social good into an economic calculation. Through the years there have been significant increases in the participation of Indigenous people in the VET sector. According to Helme (2007, p. 453), there were approximately 3,300 students in the mid-1980s. In 1996 this number had grown to 10,900, and by 2013, was 32,900 (National Centre for Vocational Education Research, 2014, table 10). In a continuing demonstration that VET is regarded as the sector-of-choice for Indigenous people, by 2017 the number of students increased to 84,500 against the trend of an overall national decline of students enrolled in government-funded courses by nearly six per cent (National Centre for Vocational Education Research, 2018, p. 6). Part of VET's attraction is often