One system, two sectors: Noonan book eyes ‘unfinished business’

Australian tertiary education will morph into a single system of two “strongly connected” sectors, with “simple, fairer” funding guided by a tertiary education commission. A reinvigorated vocational education and training (VET) sector will share equal billing with higher education, freed from the “distortions and inequities” that have seen universities flourish at vocational colleges’ expense.

VET students at apprentice level will qualify for income-contingent loans while apprenticeships – now largely restricted to the trades – will expand across “a much wider range of occupations”. Public spending on tertiary education will be maintained or increased in real terms. “Transparent” rationales will govern fees and subsidies in both sectors. Cross-subsidisation will be eliminated, with research funding separated from teaching grants.

This blueprint for change comes not from the keenly awaited final report of the Australian Universities Accord panel, but from a book on the life work of a policy heavyweight involved in many key developments in Australian tertiary education from the time of 1980s education minister John Dawkins.

Peter Noonan, who lost his life to cancer in 2022, was an adviser to Mr Dawkins when the then Labor government financed a massive expansion of the university system via income-contingent loans. At that stage Professor Noonan was already a veteran lobbyist and reformer, having been president of the Australian Union of Students, assistant national secretary of the Australian Teachers’ Federation and a senior executive in the Victorian public service.

His political, administrative, consultancy and research career spanned almost five decades. Among many key positions, he was general manager of the Australian National Training Authority in the 1990s and a member of the Bradley Higher Education Review panel in 2008. His 2019 review of the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) is considered one of the finest tertiary education reform recipes never to have taken effect.

“His reform fingerprints are everywhere,” former Australian prime minister and education minister Julia Gillard writes in a foreword to the book, Rethinking Tertiary Education. “It is impossible to imagine what Australia’s education system would look like today if we had been deprived of his wisdom.”

Co-editor Rob Pascoe said Professor Noonan had considered VET reform the “unfinished business” of the Dawkins revolution. It was also considered unfinished business of the Bradley review, some two decades later.

Professor Pascoe, a historian, said the stage was now set to right that wrong with Professor Noonan’s AQF recommendations as a “centrepiece”. The Noonan review, which was accepted by the then federal government but never implemented, proposed replacing the AQF hierarchy – a league table from basic vocational certificates to doctoral degrees – with eight knowledge bands and six skill bands, allowing more overlap between higher and vocational qualifications.

Professor Pascoe said this would be the “hardest bit of the reform” because it would require jurisdictions to agree to new metrics of knowledge, skills and capabilities. It would need to be driven by an “overarching government system” in the form of an independent tertiary education financing authority, which Professor Noonan proposed in a 2016 paper for Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute.

The new authority, currently under consideration by the Universities Accord panel, would also have the task of extending loans to higher level vocational certificates – a “glaring omission” from the Dawkins reforms, according to Professor Pascoe. “It was always a bee in Peter’s bonnet,” he said.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com