A Food and Fibre CoVE Initiative, The Taking Stock project commenced mid-2021 with the following objectives:
- Through a literature review, establish an authoritative view of best practice in Vocational Education and Training (VET) delivery against which the current state can be compared and prepare this information for inclusion in a CoVE knowledge base.
- Seek opinion from industry, VET providers and learners about what is working well in VET and what good practice looks like.
- In the process:
- Identify any issues and opportunities with respect to achieving vocational excellence across the sector. That is, note comments and observations as they arise from objective 2. It is not the intention of the project to actively search out what isn’t working.
- Identify potential performance measures by which the CoVE might report progress as and when those issues and opportunities are addressed.
The findings of the literature review are valid for the wider education sector. Feel free to use the content as you see fit but we’d also appreciate it if you can let us know what was useful, and why, so we can continue to expand our knowledgebase.
Scarlatti Ltd were awarded the contract and they in turn subcontracted Skills Consulting Group to deliver the literature review. Josh Williams and Catherine Ang from Skills Consulting have done a brilliant job of not just identifying what works best around the world (including New Zealand although there was fewer examples of excellence than we had expected). Josh and Catherine then used Tomaševski’s“4As” framework (2001) as a structuring tool to populate a set of rubrics by which vocational excellence could be measured across the Food and Fibre Sector.
Scarlatti, in collaboration with Skills Consulting, tested those rubrics in the subsequent Taking Stock interviews with industry and VET providers. While the measures themselves worked very well overall, the categories which Skills Consulting had used for those measures were not as useful. Obviously the literature Review itself must remain as originally published. That is, the rubrics contained in that paper are based on the findings of the review. Going forward however, the rubrics – as refined by the Taking Stock project post the literature review – have been integrated into a Vocational Education and Training Evaluation Framework. This will be a ‘living document’ which will be improved as and when the exposure to new practices dictates. Publication of the new Evaluation Framework is expected later in 2022 but, in the meantime, a ‘work-in-progress’ example can be found here –> Example Evaluation Framework Rubric