Developing Dynamic Meta-Competent Practice: Reimagining the Notion of Quality in the Australian Vocational Education and Training Reform Agenda

Abstract Challenges in vocational education and training (VET) sectors, are globally well documented and significant, given the sophisticated reality of Industry 4.0. In Australia, VET reform priorities place “quality” at the centre of the agenda, which begs the question as to the nature and practice of “quality”. The purpose of this transformative study is to better understand how the notion of quality is understood in the Australian VET context and its appropriateness to bringing about the type of reform necessary to address the demands of Industry 4.0. This study explores the VET reform agenda in Australia and explores the notion of readiness as a means of characterising quality vocational teaching and learning. Readiness is defined as the possession of a meta-competence that both views and approaches vocational education through a complex rather than a simple lens; the state of being agentic and able to reflect the multi-dimensional vocational ecosystem that exists in practice. This study explores the current discourse that surrounds the notion of quality and the role of the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) as reflected in a major stakeholder survey. The analysis, employing an inductive data reduction approach, reveals a uni-dimensional and atomised conception of the vocational education ecosystem which mitigates against both a positive understanding of quality and an effective systemic approach to its development.