The Whitlam Labor Government exerted increased policy and funding influence over all areas of education in Australia, including having labour market expert Myer Kangan chair a national review of TAFE which first reported in April 1974 [report available in VOCEDplus at TD/LMR 85.637]. Major barriers to entry into TAFE were extensively canvassed, with special reference to disadvantaged groups. As a result, the report recommended a range of policy and funding responses to increase citizens' opportunities to participate in a publicly funded, recurrent and vocationally oriented system of education
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The Whitlam Labor Government exerted increased policy and funding influence over all areas of education in Australia, including having labour market expert Myer Kangan chair a national review of TAFE which first reported in April 1974 [report available in VOCEDplus at TD/LMR 85.637]. Major barriers to entry into TAFE were extensively canvassed, with special reference to disadvantaged groups. As a result, the report recommended a range of policy and funding responses to increase citizens' opportunities to participate in a publicly funded, recurrent and vocationally oriented system of education that was equitable in its treatment of disadvantaged groups.
This presentation will describe how successive federal governments of different political persuasions stacked, knocked down, rearranged, sometimes redefined and rebuilt these 50-year-old policy components that are still being used to describe and understand those groups of people that are deemed to be disadvantaged. By framing the problem of disadvantage in a very specific way, it became bureaucratically inevitable that these assemblages of citizens were deemed suitable to have their station in life improved by participating in programs of vocational, technical and further education.
Please note that this article is NOT advocating for a particular position on any of the examples that have been chosen, rather, this is an initial effort to bring together a wide range of disparate literatures and examples to demonstrate how the process of making up groups that are responsive to government action operates. Virtually without exception, this process also augments arguments for the allocation of public policies and resources to reduce hardship. Kangan's 50th anniversary has been marked by the release of the Universities Accord final report [available in VOCEDplus at TD/TNC 155.81] and its modernised policy versions of disadvantaged groups. In both cases, the making up of disadvantaged groups and the related public policy responses have significant consequences for the work of educators, particularly when they become advocates for those groups deemed to be disadvantaged or individuals who have been allocated membership of one or more equity cohorts.
Edited excerpts from presentation.
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