We (Garry Argent, James Goring and Peter Kelly) have a new open access article published — and we want to share it with the practitioners, researchers, and policy makers in our network who are thinking critically about vocational education, place-based approaches, and what reform actually means for young people.
The article emerges, in part, from Garry Argent and James Goring’s participation as ‘VET Specialists’ in a state-wide action research project across Victoria during 2023–2024. Working with Deakin University and the Victorian Applied Learning Association, they were deployed across 53 programs of work in urban, regional, and rural school communities — to explore ways of improving access to and provision of Vocational Education and Training for secondary school students.
In this paper we pose, and explore, more critical questions than the reform agenda typically invites.
The Victorian Government’s response to the Firth Review — and the place-based approaches and VET cluster models it has generated — are, on the surface, reasonable and even appealing responses to persistent and systemic problems: inconsistent quality, fragmented delivery, geographic disparities, poor alignment with industry, and inequitable student access. It would be difficult to argue with the idea of collaborative networks of schools, training providers, and industry partners working together in specific communities.
So, we don’t argue with the logic, but we wanted to ask more carefully what these policy frameworks are actually doing — and what they are not doing.
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods, the article traces the historical emergence of place-based and clusters policy discourses in Victorian VET reform, from the Kirby Review of 2000 through to the Firth Review of 2020 and its ongoing implementation. What that tracing reveals is a set of contradictions at the heart of the reform agenda: the politics and materiality of place being erased even as ‘place-based’ becomes the dominant policy vocabulary; local actors being responsibilised in service of labour market logics rather than community or student aspiration; and young people’s voices being made systematically absent from the processes that claim to be designed for their benefit.
This is not an argument against vocational education, or against collaborative governance, or against trying to improve what is a genuinely fragmented and inequitable system. It is an argument for asking critical questions of the frameworks through which reform is imagined and implemented — for problematising the normative assumptions that make certain ways of governing places and knowing young people seem self-evidently correct.
The article is open access and freely available in the Journal of Education Policy – https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02680939.2026.2651149#d1e505
We would welcome responses from practitioners, researchers, policy makers, and anyone else working in or around VET in Australia and beyond.