Rethinking Pathways: Why a New Approach Is Needed—A Report From Australia

• In Event: Rethinking Educational Pathways to Promote Access

Abstract

This paper reports on the findings of a 3-year project in Australia on how to improve pathways within and between education and work. It finds that a key factor that shapes student participation in educational pathways is the structure of the labour market in different industries. Just over half of all students change their field of education when they undertake a second tertiary education qualification. It finds that overall, the relationship between specific educational qualifications and specific jobs is very weak, except where there are regulated occupations where entry and progression requirements have been specified by professional and occupational bodies. Where there are strong occupational pathways, there are strong educational pathways (for example, nursing). Strong educational pathways also result from weak occupational pathways because students need a baccalaureate degree in order to obtain a good job (for example, business studies). Weak educational pathways result when there are strong occupational outcomes, but weak occupational pathways that link occupations within the same industry (for example, in the electrical trades and engineering). Weak educational pathways also result when there are mismatches between programs and fields of education offered in each of Australia’s two sectors of tertiary education (vocational education and higher education) and where the relationship between qualifications and jobs is very indirect (for example, in the pure disciplines where most students have to get a second qualification to get a job).

The research project concludes that we need to rethink the relationship between qualifications and the labour market, and the nature of educational pathways. This has implications for the design and structure of pathways, as well as implications for institutional and government policies. However, rather than proposing tighter links between education and work, the project’s findings are that students need to be prepared for a broader range of occupations within ‘vocational streams’, where qualifications and pathways are designed to support families of linked occupations which share common concepts and practices. This implies a more developmental model of curriculum where the focus is on the development of the person in the context of their occupation, and the knowledge, skills and attributes they need to become creative, autonomous workers.

The research project draws on a range of theoretical perspectives. It uses the ‘capabilities approach’ as developed by Amartya Sen (1999, 2009) and Martha Nussbaum (2000, 2011) to provide a conceptual basis for qualifications, and literature that focuses on educational transitions (Iannelli and Raffe 2007; Raffe 2008), and labour market transitions (Bosch and Charest 2008; Schömann and O’Connell 2003) to analyse the relationship between education and work.

The project used a mixed methods approach including statistical analyses of census and survey data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and student enrolment data, industry and institutional case studies, and interviews with key stakeholders.

The scientific and scholarly implications of the project are that it leads to: rethinking the relationship between educational qualifications, specific occupations, and the labour market; consideration of a more nuanced institutional and government policies; and, the structure and design of educational pathways.

Author

• Leesa Mary Wheelahan, University of Toronto - OISE