VET side story - TAFE practitioners and the AQTF 2007: key issues of relevance and management support

Although the past decade has seen an increasing inclusion of vocational education and training (VET) in research and scholarly discourse, there is a paucity of comprehensive data on the practices of, and influences on, VET practitioners. The majority of ‘national’ research has been conducted along the eastern seaboard states and in South Australia. The Western Australian (WA) VET sector remains largely unexplored. This paper presents some of the findings of a quantitative survey of 269 VET practitioners throughout WA which highlighted the pivotal role of management support for practitioners. Path analysis clearly identified strong and positive relationships between management support and (i) practitioners’ perception of the relevance of the [Australian Quality Training Framework] AQTF to their own practice; (ii) the value that practitioners attributed to professional development activities, and (iii) their adaptation to sector changes. There was also a strong but negative relationship between management support and practitioners’ experiences of stress.

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