LOCAL universities soon will have to comply with the Australian qualifications framework.
Hitherto, their privilege of self-accreditation and their practically permanent legislated university status have allowed them to ignore the qualifications framework for all but international education. The weakness of the framework in education may be one of the reasons for its relative, if modest, success.
But tighter regulation of universities' qualifications and standards has become necessary because of the considerable expansion of the higher education market over the past 15 years and the explosion of domestic private higher education by public universities since the introduction of the postgraduate education loans scheme in 2002, and by private providers since its extension as FEE-HELP in 2005.
Australia was part of the first generation of national qualifications frameworks, with New Zealand, South Africa, Scotland and separate frameworks in the rest of Britain.
While the Australian qualifications framework was formally introduced in 1995, it incorporated qualifications structures and agreements that had been developed separately for senior secondary certificates, vocational education and higher education over the previous two decades.
The present Australian qualifications framework, like its Scottish counterpart, is effectively a federation of sub frameworks.
The Australian and Scottish frameworks are relatively loose federations, allowing each sector's qualifications to develop in relative isolation from each other, notwithstanding their formal location in the same framework.
This allowed Australian governments to use the framework as one part of the establishment of the national training system, which is one of the major achievements of co-operative federalism in tertiary education since 1995.
During the same period, Australian governments allowed senior secondary and higher education qualifications to evolve with benign neglect.
In contrast to Australia's loose arrangement, the New Zealand government sought to incorporate senior secondary and university qualifications within a more tightly regulated framework, which provoked early and largely successful resistance.
Even in vocational education Australia's qualifications framework has served a circumscribed if important role within a broader qualifications system that includes quality assurance and mechanisms for assessing, awarding and transferring credit.
The South African government and many countries that have developed qualifications frameworks more recently have imposed on them understandable but excessive expectations.
The Australian Qualifications Framework Council's recent proposal for strengthening the framework follows the Australian and Scottish successful practice of developing and reforming existing structures, rather than trying to build a new edifice.
While national frameworks are important in facilitating national markets, post-compulsory education is increasingly internationalised. The European qualifications framework is the best developed and strongest regional qualifications framework and is likely to be the precursor of an international reference for qualifications.
While the Australian qualifications framework can be strengthened, the government's goals for transforming the higher education system, released with the 2009-10 budget, can't be achieved without strengthening other parts of the qualifications system.
The Australian Universities' Quality Agency's annual quality forum for this year, held in Alice Springs last week, has been helpful in considering educational standards and assessment in addition to the issues that have long interested quality practitioners.
That they have so readily responded to governments' changed priorities suggests that quality practitioners have much to contribute to the work of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency to be established next year.
The Australian Learning and Teaching Council is also contributing to Australia's qualifications system.
Its discipline networks and curriculum and assessment resources develop expertise with respect to learning outcomes.
At present, Australian Learning and Teaching Council grants are available only to Bond University and institutions receiving commonwealth supported places. If private providers are to be a continuing part of Australian higher education, they have to be included in the conversation.
Since a longstanding goal of Australian governments has been to improve the transfer of students and credit from vocational to higher education, trust needs to be built not just within higher education, but between vocational and higher education.
This is a major gap in Australia's qualifications system which cannot be filled by loading expectations on to the qualifications framework or by imposing on it a regulatory burden which it cannot bear. Frameworks are useful for structuring conversations and agreements, but the main burden of improving transfer between the sectors must be borne elsewhere in the system.
Gavin Moodie is a higher education policy analyst at Griffith University who writes regularly for the HES.
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