International indicators for vocational education and training: An Australian perspective

This report examines issues relating to the performance indicators used for comparing Australia's vocational education and training (VET) system against other countries. Specifically, it presents an outline of the main indicators that are currently used for international comparative analysis and examines some of the problems associated with their application. It then outlines a framework for developing a set of indicators which will assist in improving the understanding of the effectiveness of vocational education and training using international comparisons. Finally, the new framework of proposed indicators is tested using available, published data.

National bodies have invested considerable resources in the task of establishing effective datacollection processes and indicators to measure the substance, effectiveness and cost of vocational education and training. In Australia, this has taken the form of a centralised administration of institutional collections of data from the vocational education and training sector and from survey data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). These collections focus on information at a domestic level. More recently, international comparative analysis has gained momentum, principally with the development of the statistical publications of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). In terms of vocational education and training, other developments in international comparison have also taken place, including the work undertaken by the member states of the European Union. This work has included the development of a set of indicators specifically for the comparison of vocational education and training systems.

A review of the indicators reveals the need to explore alternative approaches to measuring, defining and classifying Australia's vocational education and training activity in the international context. Australia's ranking on the main source of international comparison—the OECD indicators reported in the publication, Education at a glance—shows that a significant amount of activity in the sphere of VET is either being under-reported or classified and grouped in ways that limit comparisons of the effectiveness of VET systems. Much of this activity occurs at the interface of secondary school and tertiary education. The result is that data on VET reported in Education at a glance provide an inconclusive picture about the effectiveness of Australia's national VET system. This may be due in part to aspects of performance, but is more likely due to issues associated with the indicators used and the definitions and classifications that make it difficult to arrive at a fully informed view about Australia's performance. The ability to accurately compare Australia's VET system with that of other countries relies heavily on using a range of credible and valid international indicators that are sufficiently defined and consistently applied across those countries. The examination presented in the report raises questions about the extent to which this is happening in current international comparisons.

To overcome some of the current limitations, and based on the review of existing schemes, the report outlines a framework for statistical comparisons. The framework of indicators for comparing the performance of VET in Australia with VET internationally contains a number of basic requirements. At a logistical level, data must be regularly reported against the selected indicators by international or national agencies and be readily available. At a context level, up-to-date documentation on delivery structures for education and training as a whole as well as specifically for VET needs to be available. At a processing level, the ways in which country data are gathered and tabulated, including definitions and classifications, need to be transparent. Finally, at an application level, the selection of indicators should be relevant to key policy objectives rather than being simply descriptive and analytical.

Based on these requirements, a set of indicators is proposed, grouped according to the national policy priorities in VET: equipping Australians for the world of work; enhancing mobility in the labour market; achieving equitable outcomes in VET; increasing investment in training; and maximising the value of public VET expenditure. The framework also includes a set of indicators which enables the social and economic context of different countries to be compared.

An application of the proposed indicator framework was undertaken using data from published comparisons in order to establish whether it is possible to make an assessment of how effectively the VET system in Australia is working in each of the policy areas by comparison with systems in other countries. Data were located for many of the indicators, and comparisons using those indicators are provided.

In the process of obtaining data for many of the indicators, several issues emerged. Uniformity in both the breadth of coverage and the points of time of comparison raised problems. Data for different countries were not necessarily available for the same period of time, and the number of countries on which there were available data varied depending on the indicator. Not all of the available comparisons provide information on Australia. Further work is needed to establish whether or not, for the indicators missing data on Australia, data can be sourced or whether they need to be collected.

The application of the framework also revealed that published comparisons were not available for some indicators. The availability and accessibility of data remain issues. The data used in this report were from secondary sources, involving comparisons already published in available reports or documents. This means that all of the comparisons were based on classifications and comparisons developed in other work. They do not necessarily provide adequate detail for a comparative evaluation of the effectiveness of national VET systems. Further work is needed using primary sources of data rather than secondary sources—work beyond the scope of this report—to examine the extent to which the indicators can be developed to more effectively capture the effectiveness of national VET systems. Primary sources for this purpose could include results from national surveys of education and training or labour force surveys undertaken regularly in countries such as Canada, the United States, and European Union members as well as in Australia.