Rethinking Tertiary Education

The future of Australia as a post-industrial economy depends on how knowledge, skills and capabilities are learned and fostered. Every Australian will need to engage with the tertiary education system, both to acquire an initial qualification and to up-skill or re-skill over the course of their lives. The time has come to address the divide between vocational and higher education and implement a reform agenda that has been in development over the last decade. This will involve reforming the Australian Qualifications Framework to give greater recognition to skills alongside knowledge, and enable the vocational and higher education sectors to design fit-for-purpose courses. It will also require reform of the pathways, partnerships, curriculum, funding and regulation and to provide the coherence, quality, navigability and relevance needed for students, providers and industry. The central figure in the development of this policy agenda was Peter Noonan, professor of Tertiary Education at Victoria University, who sadly passed away in 2022 after forty years as Australia's leading tertiary education policy thinker and adviser to both sides of government.

Peter Dawkins was Vice-Chancellor and President of Victoria University from 2011 to 2020, where he introduced the revolutionary ‘block model’ of teaching and learning. In 2014 he wrote Reconceptualising Tertiary Education, an influential paper that resulted in a program of work at the Mitchell Institute led by Peter Noonan. In 2021 Dawkins jointly led a federal government review of University-Industry Collaboration in Teaching and Learning, which argued for reforms and initiatives to strengthen connections between industries and tertiary education. Megan Lilly is executive director of the Australian Industry Group’s Centre for Education and Training and is a leading figure in education and training policy. She was a member of the Australian Qualifications Review Panel chaired by Peter Noonan in 2019. Robert Pascoe is a well-known author and history professor at Victoria University, who teaches and researches world history, history of transport and Australian social history. He has written extensively about education.