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This paper considers the impact of the recently established Learning and Skills Council (LSC) and its 'new' partnership approach to planning post 16 education and training in one region in England. Using data from a study of a sub-regional partnership in the Black Country region of England, the rhetoric and reality of partnership working are analysed in the context of the LSC's preferred 'bottom-up and top-down' approach. The data from qualitative research over a two-year period, tracking the formation and development of a partnership for promoting learning, is used to identify some emerging trends in successful partnership working. The history and development of the partnership are discussed in the context of the region it serves and the views of senior managers related to the implementation of national and regional policy to shed some light on the partnership approach to planning and delivering education and training.

Attempts to prepare students for the new knowledge economy often focus only on economic imperatives and ignore the significant social and cultural implications of globalisation. Indeed, there is an inherent tension between responding to the needs of the 'market' and providing effective space where the multiple voices of post-colonial, postmodern society can be heard and appreciated. If we are to produce graduates that can operate effectively and sensitively in Australia's multicultural society and in our globalised world, we need to change our assessment practices to not only value multiple social and cultural ways of knowing and learning but also enable all students to negotiate many aspects of difference. This paper explores a Queensland Univetsity of Technology (QUT) teaching and learning project that examined the social and cultural implications of current assessment practices in Faculty of Arts core units in Semester One 2001 and developed new guidelines for socially and culturally responsive assessment.

The work of vocational education and training (VET) teachers and trainers has been subject to marked change over the past decade. It has been a time of downsizing, retrenchment and 'packaging', increasing casualisation, and rapid policy change. Contextual changes have fundamentally transformed VET's orientation from education to business and service and shifted the VET teacher/trainer along a continuum from an emphasis on teaching and creating curriculum towards more entrepreneurial brokering and delivery of competencies within pre-packaged modules in a climate of intense market competition. This paper, based on a study funded by the National Research and Evaluation Committee (NREC), examines the changes to VET work and the perceived nature of the impact of these changes on VET teachers and trainers.

Research has been conducted on the learning preferences and strategies of vocational education and training (VET) learners and the support provided to them in the workplace. That research has shown that strategies need to be developed to enhance the preparedness of both the learners and the workplace if flexible delivery in the workplace is to be successful. This paper reports on the findings of a research project, supported by the National Research and Evaluation Committee (NREC), that tested the feasibility of those strategies for implementation in operating workplaces. Using data collected from interviews and focus groups at twelve enterprises representing a range of industries and business sizes in metropolitan and regional Victoria, the research identified strategies that were considered to be feasible, strategies that were supported in a qualified way, and strategies that were perceived as largely unfeasible

The dictates of the quality movement form the rubric for the conduct of many processes within vocational education and training (VET): teaching, assessment, reporting, recording, research, customer service, auditing, financial management, business and industry partnerships, and so on. Traditional concepts of industrial quality were founded in post-war manufacturing contexts, and premised on products and processes being observable and measurable. The assessment, control and assurance of quality were regarded as (and are still widely believed to be) empirically verifiable. Total Quality Management (TQM) is an outgrowth of such positivist philosophies, as is the entire ISO 9000 system of certification. Although the verification of standards and procedures that these systems promise served certain needs of the old economy, how have they managed to retain their place in the new economy? This paper will argue that the concept of `quality' as a central plank in the Protestant project of unending self-improvement has been transformed and re-vitalised in the new economy which is service-oriented, globally-focused and infinitely flexible, in which students/workers must continually re-invent themselves in response to shifting workplace demands and/or personal imperatives. It is, therefore, timely to problematise the ideology of quality and to examine its rhetoric. This paper will focus on that rhetoric as it is employed in several VET-related contexts.