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It is important to have a flexible approach to teaching, as the adult migrant education program at Victoria University found with newly-arrived learners from Africa.

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Small-scale micro-enterprises currently constitute major employers and drivers of economic activity Australia, and this trend is likely to expand in the future as entrepreneurs emerge from unexpected groups like women from refugee and migrant backgrounds. Furthermore, learning small business skills positively impacts individuals' language and literacy development. Stepping Stones is a micro-enterprise program that offers mentoring, training and support to women from refugee, migrant and asylum seeker backgrounds to develop new skills and increase participation in business and community. This article describes this program in terms of its structure, participants and its implications for literacy development (financial, digital, communication, visual and social media literacies) as women participate to develop knowledge and experience of small business practices.

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This article presents an analysis and account of a case study to find ways to better build agency and explore pathways for young English as Second Language (ESL) learners. The author conducted eight case studies of students of Non English Speaking Background (NESB) who had experienced a number of ESL courses in vocational education and training (VET) settings. The participants' lack of knowledge of competency based training and competency based assessment inspired the author to investigate agency, or the power to decide what, how and when to learn, of ESL students. The article discusses the role of curriculum in creating agency for NESB students in VET institutes in Victoria.

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Not all vocational teachers are going to feel equipped with the skills to accommodate the literacy development of their students. As the author explains, providing dual delivery programs where the literacy development scaffolds the vocational development is one way of addressing this issue. Show less

This article provides a background and overview of the Core Skills for Work (CSfW) framework and outlines the main similarities and differences between it and the Employability Skills Framework. The article includes suggestions as to why the Employability Skills Framework did not provide the outcomes it was designed to provide and what strategies were implemented in some areas to improve its efficacy and explores whether these could also be applied to the use of CSfW.

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This article focuses on education for women in prison, primarily focusing on the role of Vocational Education and Training (VET), and the way education changes lives for both the students in prison and beyond, as well as for their teachers at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre (DPFC) and Tarrengower.

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The Community of Practice research scholarships awarded by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) enable practitioners to conduct research about issues that affect them. The value of such research is that it benefits the wider literacy and numeracy community and raises further research questions.

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Poor literacy is often generational. Parents with low literacy skills struggle to support their children in attaining the experiences they need to develop good reading habits and school readiness skills. A collaborative approach to adult and family literacy in Western Australian prisons, supporting the literacy needs of prisoners, gives them a better chance of breaking the cycle.

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The Adult Community and Further Education (ACFE) Board has initiated a project to support quality non-accredited teaching and learning in adult and community education (ACE). The project aims to work towards consistency in quality and standards of non-accredited provision and to raise awareness of opportunities and pathways for ACE students through the identification of best practice curriculum, teaching and delivery. This article describes a resource that has been developed by the project team. Called the A-Frame, it is a tool to assist providers to demonstrate quality control through a uniform quality system and process as well as to demonstrate the valuable and varied outcomes achieved by learners and the pathways they move on. Show less

In this article on Scottish Gaelic literacy there are parallels to be drawn with Aboriginal literacy here in Australia. Some pertinent questions are: (1) what are the benefits of teaching in the first language medium?; (2) how do we sustain or re-invigorate a language?; and (3) what are the difficulties for learners literate in a second language becoming literate in their first language?

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