Reform or Transform?

I was at the VET Teaching Conference held in Brisbane during May and one of the speakers sparked my interest with the question of Reform or Transform? She reminded us that our industry is seemingly always in reformation… so when will we be finished? When will we be reformed? This got me thinking. As practitioners, the “reform” agenda is not one of our making. It is usually imposed by government and every 5 years or so, someone comes along and decides that their legacy activity will be to fix VET. However, we have a system which is the envy of the world. Our vocational education products are highly respected abroad, we have genuine buy-in from industry and Australia is one of the only places where competency-based approaches have been sustained. So rather than “reform”, which is often met with resistance, we should look to “transform” which involves willingness from people to develop and grow. We should be looking to transform better into best; Transform networks into highly functioning hubs; and transform learning into partnerships in Excellence!

Reformation only gives us incremental improvement, whereas transformation delivers exponential improvement!

Marc Ratcliffe
CEO, MRWED Group
Follow Me on twitter: @MRWED_CEO