Student choice and lifelong learning: who you gonna call?

This paper explores some specific outcomes resulting from the progressive implementation of national competition and new public management policies favouring increased user choice. Since the early-1990s vocational education and training strategies have consistently advocated for greater levels of student choice of provider in a contestable market. In addition to noting the significance of choice, the 1974 Kangan Review of TAFE [available in VOCEDplus at TD/LMR 85.637] also ensured that the post-school, non-university educational option was intimately linked to notions of access and equity in support of lifelong learning. The National Vocational Education and Training Provider Collection provides the data used to compare student and training package characteristics from different years selected because they mark key policy and program developments on the journey of implementation to the mature contestable training market in which over 4,000 providers compete. In particular the impact of increased student choice on measures of access and equity is identified through a trend analysis.

The specific characteristics include system-wide numbers of students and enrolments as well as the number of students by enrolment in the top 20 training packages, the various fields of education, level of relative remoteness/access to services, Indigenous status and level of relative socio-economic disadvantage. If the introduction of contestable markets has delivered the anticipated benefits in access, equity and choice that were projected in the various state and territory training entitlements/guarantees, it would be expected that the trends would show larger numbers of students from each equity group and region obtaining qualifications in a wider range of occupations. If not, the ability of the national training system to produce a nation of lifelong learners who experience equitable access by exercising a wide variety of choices is called into question; as is 25 years of bi-partisan public policy consistency.

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