'Different but Equal': The Rise and Demise of the TAFE Teachers Association of Australia 1964 - 1992

Abstract

During the latter half of the twentieth century, Australian technical and further education (TAFE) was developed as a mass system of post-compulsory education. The relatively few national histories of TAFE have been written from the standpoint of policy makers and senior administrators, resulting in a predominantly structuralist interpretation in which the experience and agency of TAFE teachers remain unacknowledged.

My thesis seeks to redress this imbalance through a history of the TAFE Teachers' Association of Australia. The Association was established in 1964 as a loose federation of State-based technical teacher organisations. Its purpose was to act as a national voice and advocate for TAFE teachers in a policy arena that was primarily concerned with constructing and maintaining a meritocratic settlement in education.

The Association had no independent authority, very limited finances and was almost entirely reliant on a handful of committed volunteers. In addition to the Association's archive and journal, the thesis makes extensive use of oral histories and interviews to explore how these key actors conceptualised TAFE, the issues and relationships of most significance to them and the ways these changed during the life of the Association.

The thesis analyses the influence of the Association on federal policy with an emphasis on the sharply contrasting constructions of TAFE by the Whitlam and the Hawke Labor governments. The TAFE Teachers' Association had little success until 1973 when the federal government acknowledged it as the peak national TAFE teacher organisation, a status it maintained until its dissolution in 1992. The Association was instrumental in the Whitlam government's decision to establish and support TAFE as a 'different but equal' third sector of tertiary education that expanded to cater for the diverse interests of more than a million students each year. As it grew, 'TAFE' became a contested concept across different teaching cultures and competing policy networks. The Association thus found it increasingly difficult to formulate agreed policies or to present a united national voice.

In comparison with school and higher education unions, the TAFE Teachers' Association was more receptive to the Hawke government's stridently instrumentalist view of education and several of its leaders collaborated with the wider union movement in refashioning TAFE as an adjunct to neoliberal labour market reform. This caused a deepening rift between its NSW and Victorian representatives, disrupting the Association's internal consensus. Drawing on interviews with former prominent TAFE unionists, I explore the reasons for this radical shift in the Association's philosophy of TAFE. This sheds light on how many of the Association's earlier gains were forfeited and how trust in the idea of a national union was dissipated.

The thesis concludes that the history of the Association gives voice to an underlying ambivalence among TAFE teachers about their educational role and value. This ambivalence hindered the formation of a coherent national identity among TAFE teachers and limited their ability to argue convincingly for the further development of TAFE.