VET teachers are feeling 'othered' in schools: research

One of the project leads, Associate Professor Suzanne Rice from The University of Melbourne, says VET teachers in schools aren’t “feeling very privileged”.

They reported feeling misunderstood, under-supported and unappreciated due to the divide between education and industry systems in the small study.

“We’re teaching VET in schools, but leaders and colleagues don't understand what we're doing”. Eight of the nine teachers interviewed held an initial teacher education qualification," one of the nine teachers interviewed for the study said. 

Rice says VET teachers must grapple with extra compliance measures. 

“VET teachers have additional compliance burdens, having to update their VET sector certification every two years, and maintain industry currency, but a mainstream teacher does not need to update their university qualifications, although they do have to undertake professional learning.”

VET teachers are being othered because they “straddle two very different systems”, she says.

“They’ve got a foot in the school-based education system, and another foot in the VET camp.

"They’re operating within two completely different regulatory frameworks. There can be an element of the VET sector not always understanding the education system well and vice versa.”

School leaders play a role

Rice says school leadership support can impact upon VET teachers’ job satisfaction – one principal championed VET, while others did not always recognise its importance.

School leaders “holding the purse strings” don’t tend to come through a VET pathway or have industry experience, she says. That can be a problem given the huge number of materials involved in most VET lessons. 

“One VET teacher said school finishes at 3:30pm and there’s a staff meeting called at 3:35pm, but he has so much packing up to do. There’s no extra time allocation to do their setting up and packing away nor to update their training to maintain industry currency,” she says.

“As well, VET has traditionally had a lower status in the school curriculum and the media plays into that with its festival of high ATARs when those results come out. We don’t see anything similar about the high-achieving VET students. And you still get some parents who really push for their kids to get into university because they see it as high status.

“All of that contributes to a sort of marginalisation of VET teachers”. 

However, she says students’ increasing uptake of school-based VET subjects shows the senior secondary space is shifting from a focus on just academic subjects.

“One participant commented that mainstream teachers will say a student isn’t that good at an academic subject, but they’re good with their hands, so they should do a VET subject like it’s a backup.

"That’s a misunderstanding from peers and it really irritates VET teachers. There’s more to VET and academically inclined students are taking up VET subjects.”

Feeling othered was a surprising finding of the study because it aimed to delve into the motivations and work-satisfaction of long-staying VET and applied learning teachers.

Extrinsic motivations – job security, work-life balance, and salary – were part of the attraction to teaching for VET teachers in schools.

Intrinsic motivations were also important to VET teachers in schools and included a drive for social justice, working with and supporting young people.

‘Othered’ by scholars, too

She says the study’s theoretical basis acknowledged many different groups of teachers are nested in the education system workforce.

Even scholars have ‘othered’ school-based VET teachers and teaching as a topic.

“VET in schools has been a bit sidelined as a research area, so we wanted to understand more about the teacher shortage [in VET in schools], their motivations, and intentions. We weren’t even sure if people saw it as a long-term job or a stop gap.”

One VET teacher, a designer, appreciated the regularity of work and income compared to their previous ad hoc work: “they were never sure if they were going to earn enough to pay their bills”.

Others with a hospitality background enjoyed the work-life balance of teaching.

“That was important because they had families so the regular hours of school teaching and the fact that you got holidays and weren’t expected to be up at midnight working in a kitchen made a big difference.”

Rice said VET teaching is “hiding in plain sight” as a career pathway from or to regular teaching. Not all people who career change into teaching have to be STEM professionals.

“We should also consider in-school pathways. There’s also a real potential to revamp policy and practice, to look at ways for schools to support VET teachers to maintain their industry currency and meet compliance requirements.

“VET learning is essential to many pathways vital to the economy and there’s been long-standing shortages of teachers being available to teach VET in school. What exacerbates that is a tight labour market and a greying workforce,” she says.

And the clincher? Despite being othered, all of the study participants said they wanted to stay in their roles in the long-term.

“They were committed to it. That surprised us as we thought they might go back to industry,” Rice says, who’s hoping to extend the research nationally.