The educational politics of curriculum policy in Vocational Education and Training in Australia

This research investigates the effects of the 1987 federal government’s Vocational Education and Training (VET) policy on curriculum development on NSW TAFE by undertaking a critical policy analysis and utilising interview data. Drawing on Foucault’s (1980, 1982) power/knowledge nexus, the study examines the complexities of social and structural relations to power and knowledge and how the state regulates the acquisition of knowledge. Foucault (1972a) saw curriculum as one form of social regulation that connects the citizen to the state. The VET policies embodied power relations by prescribing new practices that regulates the individual in a manner that is interrelated with the multiple demands of the new neoliberal economy and the expanding control of the state. VET became a mechanism for social and macroeconomic reform by being tied to youth employment, skills formation, human capital and Australia’s global economic competitiveness. This study also draws on Popkewitz’s (1987, 1991, 1997) notion that the state exploits curriculum as a converting ordinance. Technical curriculum postulates the forms of knowledge which frame and classify the world, the nature of work and in turn organises and shapes individual identity and citizenship (Olson et al. 2015). Through a case study I demonstrate how the VET policy initiatives introduced mechanisms that privileged certain political and professional actors to dominate knowledge and thereby impose their identity in the construction of educational policy, and how other stakeholders have been disadvantaged by the selection, organisation and control of curriculum intellectual property in TAFE NSW. The dominant educational philosophies in VET aim to inculcate people to adapt to these social forms rather than critically interrogate them. The federal government privatised the writing and ratifying of VET course content by contracting Industry Skills Councils to produce training packages, which specified the learning outcomes and required competencies embedded in the competency-based VET qualifications (Goozee 2001). The VET curriculum was also rationalised by the removal of the cognitive and behavioural attributes of knowledge to permit the awarding of qualifications via the Recognition of Prior Learning (Buchanan et al. 2004). The study concludes that there is no embedded curriculum in VET or TAFE NSW courses. This afforded NSW TAFE, and the for-profit sector, the privilege to determine the volume-of-learning, student/teacher ratios and modes of delivery, which allowed the student-centred citizenship paradigm of VET to be replaced with an economic, human-capital model