Advancing equity: Merging 'bottom up' initiatives with 'top down' strategies

The purpose of this study was to identify the factors which help successful equity initiatives that had been ‘seeded’ in technical and further education (TAFE) institutes through short-term funding to ‘take root and spread’. Overall, we found such initiatives lack cohesion and their spread was minimal. Equity clients are those who need extra support because they are disadvantaged in relation to learning.

• The cause of equity appears to have lost ground during the past decade of vocational education and training (VET) reform. Many are of the view that equity needs to be reinstated as a priority principle in the sector, in line with the social justice foundations of VET established by Kangan in 1974.
  
  
• Funds allocated through short-term pilot equity initiatives have been primarily used to purchase direct support for learners, including a substantial increase in teacher-to-student ratios. This individual support for disadvantaged clients—often with multiple disadvantages—results in good outcomes. However, the initiatives rarely permeate into the institutes to the extent of influencing other practitioners.
  
  
• The most successful initiatives are those which had been established by people in the community rather than by government or government agencies, ‘outsiders’ who had a long-term commitment to the specific equity group.
  
  
• The funding model—‘seed funding’—is flawed. One-off pilot projects rarely generate ongoing provision. Furthermore, pilot projects need to be systematically applied in other contexts to test their long-term applicability.
  
  
• Policy-makers and funding bodies responsible for equity in the VET sector need to rethink the funding mechanisms currently used to stimulate innovative equity practice.
  

The purpose of this research was to investigate the way in which short-term funded ‘pilot’ equity initiatives permeate the technical and further education (TAFE) institutes where they were seeded. The term ‘merging’ in the title refers to the relationship between practitioners’ successful initiatives and the policies of their institutes, an association which enables good new practice to flourish.

Before turning to the particular findings and conclusions, we would like to highlight a message we heard time and time again during the study. It is that the cause of equity seems to have lost traction during the past decade of vocational education and training (VET) reform. This was not intentional, but attention has been directed elsewhere. There is a widespread sense that the sector needs, as a priority, to reinstate equity as a matter of principle, in line with the social justice foundations of VET laid down by Kangan in 1974. A return to equity is also an infinitely practical matter because there is every indication that there will be an influx of equity clients into VET, primarily due to federal legislation (the 2005 Disability Standards Act and the Welfare to Work legislation introduced in mid-2006). In addition, there have been changes to the effective school leaving age—that is, the ‘formal education leaving age’—which are in place in two states and pending in others.

It might be useful, too, to explain how we define ‘equity’ clients. They are those who need extra support because they are disadvantaged in relation to learning—disadvantaged because of poor literacy or a lack of confidence, or a sense of cultural alienation in a TAFE institute or other provider. This specifically avoids the language of target equity groups because not all Indigenous people, not all mature-aged and not all women have special needs when it comes to learning in VET. Even where people in these ‘equity populations’ have special needs, not all have the same special need. Neither do we take a general ‘managing diversity’ perspective, because in that perspective—which views all clients as having needs—the very idea of disadvantage is lost. Yet educational disadvantage is alive and well and needs specifically to be addressed.

Merging ‘bottom up’ practice with ‘top down’ strategies within TAFE institutes

The language of ‘bottom’ and ‘top’ is shorthand for the equity knowledge, practices and intentions of practitioners (at the ‘bottom’) as distinct from the equity understandings, strategies, and intentions of senior executives (at the ‘top’). It was pleasing to find that the bottoms and tops in all six TAFE institutes that constituted the fieldwork sites for this study were united in their desire to find mechanisms for aligning equity practice and strategy that will work more effectively than currently, and lead to improved outcomes for equity clients.

The research program was designed to produce a set of evidence-based protocols which would help organisations merge effective bottom-up practice with top-down strategy, and vice versa, although constructing a formal set of such guidelines at this stage would go beyond the evidence acquired. What the evidence has allowed us to do is to identify promising mechanisms for aligning top and bottom. These mechanisms constitute a well-grounded series of tasks for experimenting (action research) within TAFE institutes and within other interested registered training organisations. The tasks include:

• Identifying specific issues or problems in the institute which interfere with attempts to improve outcomes for disadvantaged learners: several examples were mentioned, including poor articulation between pre-vocational equity programs and vocational programs, and uncertainty about the appropriateness of cross-subsidising programs for disadvantaged learners from other income streams. These are issues that might be productively tackled at the local level.
  
  
• Identifying the few individuals adept at boundary-crossing and connecting with many: in its more recent, more interesting form, knowledge-brokering is concerned with bringing people together and helping them to build relationships, uncover needs and share ideas amongst themselves, all of which will help them do their jobs better.
  
  
• Addressing inconsistencies in accountability measures: there are necessary differences in the accountability requirements in staff in different levels in TAFE institutes. A way of overcoming this problem is through an outcomes hierarchy. This is a template for constructing a set of outcomes which start from those which practitioners find most germane to their work with equity clients (for example, improved attendance, completing work), progressing to those indicators the system is most concerned with (for example, qualifications, employment). The important point is that an outcomes hierarchy, without dismantling established key performance indicator regimes, allows people working at different positions in a system to tell their ‘equity story’ in ways that make most sense to them.
  
  
• Strengthening practitioner collaboration: practitioners working with disadvantaged learners themselves need to be supported. One of the most effective resources for this is each other, but they need time and opportunities for sustained conversation and trust-building.

These tasks, undertaken systematically and widely through the sector, with the experiences collected in detail, would build the foundation upon which formal advice—perhaps an interactive electronic guide—could be developed which would help ensure that the equity insights and ambitions of practitioners and those of management cohere and reinforce one another.

The ‘seed funding’ model for equity initiatives

Studying the influence of short-term funded equity initiatives on their institutes was, in effect, to study the funding model itself. The model, which has been used repeatedly in equity provision, offers practitioners extra funds for a limited time, typically 12 months, to test the value of some new approach. The theory is that successful initiatives will show practitioners what they can accomplish, and consequently they will continue the practice.

In the equity initiatives we studied, the funds were primarily used to purchase direct support for learners, including a substantial increase in teacher-to-student ratios; an expansion of the range of adults who worked with the students, including individual mentoring; and sometimes an extension of course duration. With this additional support, disadvantaged clients, many of whom were burdened with multiple and complex barriers to successful learning, achieved good outcomes. However, only a few initiatives permeated far into their institutes—to influence either other practitioners or institute policy and resource allocation.

The problem—the fact that the new practice stops once funding stops—lies with the funding model itself and the theory that one-off ‘pilot’ funds can generate ongoing provision. What the initiatives actually piloted was the use and usefulness of extra support for disadvantaged learners and their teachers. The extra resources were an essential ingredient. Unless that level of resourcing is maintained or obtained from another source, there is no nutrient for its continuance. That much is obvious.

There is a second flaw in the theory, which practitioners were at pains to point out. Even the most experienced said they needed to try a new practice in several contexts with different students if they were to learn how to make best use of the extra resources. Even 12 months with one small group—and often the ‘trial’ lasts for fewer than 12 months—is still only the beginning of the learning curve.

Of the ten initiatives we studied, what is notable is that three of the most effective and long-lived had been initiated by people in the community rather than by government or government agencies. In one case it was a small business established to employ young people with a disability; in another, mining companies in the Pilbara were interested in building a local Indigenous workforce; and in the third, an independent welfare agency was supporting disengaged youths. In all three cases the ‘outsiders’ had a long-term commitment to the equity group in question—an imperative, in fact, to succeed. They were not interested merely in piloting, but in ensuring that good practice lasted and grew.

The inevitable conclusion is that policy-makers and funding agents responsible for equity in the VET sector need to rethink the funding mechanisms currently used to stimulate innovative equity practice. The current model, which churns through one kind of extra support for equity clients and their teachers one year, another kind the next year, and so on, effectively returns people to square one after the funding has been withdrawn or has moved on. It is useful for sparking innovation, but an investment mindset is required if effective new practices are to grow and develop, develop and spread until there are real changes to outcomes.

An ecological perspective

We began the study with a metaphorical use of the language of ecology. The initial proposal for this project likened short-term funded initiatives to the introduction of an intruder into a TAFE ecosystem. It continued to be a useful metaphor throughout the fieldwork. It should be noted that the research trialled a number of methods for gaining an understanding of the experiences and thinking of the many practitioners and managers we talked to. These approaches included using cultural probes, story-telling, relationship-mapping and metaphor elicitation (asking people to use metaphors to describe their experiences). We found that asking people what kind of ecosystem their TAFE resembled really engaged them and encouraged them to think most creatively. It seems that an ecological perspective—even at a rather superficial metaphorical level—is a useful tool for stimulating insightful thinking about interactions and feedback loops, both real and possible, within TAFE institutes.

An ecological perspective is, however, more than a metaphorical tool. As the preceding sections indicate, we had to look outside TAFE institutes—to the agencies that fund equity initiatives and to their local communities—if we were to understand what was happening inside the institutes. The larger ecosystems in which institutes are embedded are a fundamental part of the picture. It is hardly surprising that the overarching VET systems (state and federal) influence internal TAFE ecosystems and their capacity to respond to equity clients. What has perhaps not been so well appreciated is the very positive role that the local community ecosystem can play, especially if the nature of the relationship between community and institute is made more equal, more reciprocal.

The three initiatives which were instigated by businesses or agencies in the local community developed eventual partnerships with TAFE institutes. These were not the traditional type, where each party comes to the table with a well-defined role and carries out its part of the bargain. Rather, in these partnerships the boundaries were blurred and interactions fluid. People couldn’t remember who had thought of what first. Even the notion of leveraging resources seems inappropriate; pooling resources gives a better sense of what was happening. One informant calls these partnerships ‘hybrids’ because neither side operates as it had previously. From an ecological perspective the partners have been transformed into new creatures. It was noticeable that these community-initiated developments were stimulating more changes within TAFE institutes than were government pilot programs.

Systems thinking is another approach to understanding the internal and external interactions of organisations, as it also emphasises the interdependence of distinct elements in large systems and the dynamic tensions which result. An ecological perspective, however, worked best in our study, perhaps because it is more organic and is intuitively grasped. An ecological perspective certainly provided an exceptionally robust foundation for the many dimensions of our project. It might serve others in the VET sector equally well.