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During 2003, 55 organisations received funding through Reframing the Future to undertake workbased learning projects focusing on the professional development criteria in [the Australian National Training Authority’s] ANTA’s blueprints for implementation ‘Bridging pathways’ (indexed at TD/TNC 63.291) and ‘Partners in a learning culture’ (indexed at TD/TNC 62.913). An evaluation of these projects has found rich stories and substantial evidence of how [vocational education and training] VET professionals across Australia change, adapt and work together to adjust their knowledge, values, attitudes, resources and practices to meet the challenges of learner needs in our complex and diverse training system. This paper will present the evidence and illustrate it with stories from everyday VET experience where diversity, equity and flexibility move from rhetoric to reality.

Terminology is all-important in the learning environment. Lecturer, teacher, course and curriculum are words that fit a learning model that centres on information transfer; they are words at odds with many contemporary uses of [vocational education and training] VET. Centrelink Virtual College is an in-house enterprise [registered training organisation] RTO working hard to redefine VET practice in order for its application to be relevant to our core business, our learning professions and our learners. This redefinition of practice demands a new terminology. This discussion will focus on inhouse enterprise uses of VET and its links to performance management, the new developing terminology, and the challenge to maintain high quality learning in different environments.

Governments do not fund vocational education and training just to satisfy students' needs and correspondingly they don't base their vocational education and training policies on students' needs alone. But what if they did? What would a vocational education and training policy look like if it were founded on this conference's theme - student and teacher: the heart of the matter? This [paper] considers the implications of students' needs and teachers' roles for vocational education and training policy. It starts by rehearsing theories of learning which posit that learning is most effective if it starts with each student's current knowledge and interests and reflects students' different learning preferences. It then reviews what is known of Australian vocational education and training students' educational backgrounds and interests to consider how learning may be organised and supported to best meet students' needs. Since teachers are central to constructing students' learning the paper considers how teachers may be best supported to meet students' needs.

The paper outlines outcomes and issues generated from a partnership between Charles Sturt University (CSU) and the University of Goroka (UOG) to develop Papua New Guinea's first vocational education degree. The partnership, funded through AusAID's Primary and Secondary Teacher Education Project (PASTEP), examined the transfer capacity of CSU's vocational education and training (VET) courses to Papua New Guinea's technical vocational education and training (TVET) environment. An extended site-visit and consultancy period revealed both compatibilities and challenges. While Papua New Guinean TVET programs are being progressively re-modelled on the Australian VET system, increasing the capacity of Australian materials to meet local TVET trainee-teacher needs, there remain 'gaps’ generated by the tensions within and between the needs of an emergent 'modernist' economy and the desirability and reality of cultural sustainability. A suggested solution to these potentially conflicting demands has been the adaptation of CSU's materials to include additional content-based contextual and traditional craft-training and associated business and entrepreneurial subjects. It is anticipated that TVET teacher graduates will then be better prepared to work with students through developing both 'modernist' trade skills while preserving and developing traditional craft skills. Given that 80% of PNG's population live and work in the 'informal' or traditional economy, the proposed CSU-UOG cross cultural model should meet urgent national needs related to economic survival, as well as providing options for entering the capitalist cash economy.

This paper addresses the issue of attrition and retention of a minority group in a large multi-ethnic, urban polytechnic located in an area of low socio-economic status. One of the important findings in recent work on attrition and retention has been to note that while there are common factors with regard to cause and alleviation, there is also a significant element of local expression in the configuration of factors. The purpose of this research has been to gather data from Maori and Pacific Islands students in a Manukau (South Auckland) polytechnic who have left their courses without completing. The focus of the research has been the students' view of the causes of their not continuing and their suggestions of strategies for improvement in the institutional arrangements for participation and support of Maori and Pacific Islands students. A survey was conducted of Maori and Pacific Islands students who had left their courses after the first two weeks of study but before completion. While issues of contact and reply are endemic to this kind of study, the researcher achieved a return rate and depth of response which was both informative and supportive of the notion that local work can offer considerable insight when considered alongside internationally recognised models such as those of Vincent Tinto. The findings of this research configures the dual impacts of 'internal' institutional factors with regard to creating an engaging environment and the very real 'external' effects of social and economic disadvantage in this locality. The findings are presented in a manner that reflects on the applicability of global research in this area to the local situation with Maori and Pacific Islands students. In a tertiary environment that has signalled high priority for the development of strategies to increase participation and success of Maori and Pacific Islands students at the tertiary level, these findings are a valuable contribution.