The factors affecting implementing technical and vocational education curriculum in Australian schools

Implementing any educational curriculum depends on factors that ensure the success of it. In this regard, the purpose of this study is to identify the factors affecting the implementation of the technical and vocational education curriculum in Australian schools; it has two stages.

The research method is qualitative and has been done in two stages: In the first one, inductive qualitative content analysis method was used to identify the success factors of technical and vocational curriculum in Australia, and in the second stage, Delphi method was used to validate the identified components. The study population in the first stage were research articles, dissertations and documents of the Australian Technical and Vocational Education System, in which 28 selected documents were considered as purposefully samples and in the second stage, 11 elites were purposefully selected for the Delphi group from among the faculty members of the Department of Educational Sciences in Iranian and Australian universities with a background in research on technical and vocational education. In this study, first the selected documents were analyzed and in three coding stages, the main components were extracted by the researcher using Maxqda software and then these components were validated by the members of the Delphi group using an online questionnaire.

The findings showed that in the most important factors affecting the implementation of technical and vocational education curriculum were identified in three main themes: technical factors (access and participation, quality, curriculum elements, employee commitment, information and equipment), political factors (goal setting, relationship with industry, budget, support, inter-organizational interaction and relationship with higher education) and cultural factors (community awareness, positive attitude, parent recognition, incentive schemes and alternative paths to higher education). Recognizing the success factors of Australia in the implementation of technical and vocational education curriculum in secondary schools, for the Iranian education system to improve the quality of formal technical and vocational curricula contains valuable points.