The Challenge
The Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector in NSW is undergoing a large-scale renewal to place the state as the leader in practical skills education for the needs of the future workforce. Students in VET represent more regional, disabled, and disadvantaged cohorts than the university sector, people who are traditionally less likely to be engaged in giving feedback, expressing their voice, and being participants in advocacy.
The NSW Department of Education has a strategic priority to ensure “students at the centre” of everything they do. In their efforts to continuously improve the student experience, they identified that students in VET did not have the same opportunity to use their voice to affect change in the system that those students in secondary schooling and university had. ThinkPlace was engaged by the Department to research current practice locally and internationally and speak to students to design a series of options to allow them to capture and use student voice in an authentic, robust, and ongoing way.
Our Response
In uplifting the voice of students, we needed to engage beyond those who were already engaged, and go out to speak proactively to students in person. 157 students were consulted through a combination of in-person and virtual engagements. Our team travelled to multiple locations around metro and regional NSW, including Griffith, Wagga Wagga, Inverell, Tamworth, Meadowbank, the Hunter, Port Macquarie, and Ultimo. Students came from a wide variety of backgrounds, ages, and courses being studied, with a particular focus on underrepresented cohorts. We asked about their study experience, motivations for study, their priorities in life, and what appetite they would have to be involved in student voice. We iterated a number of design concepts for student voice mechanisms based on a first phase of consultation, before testing these with students, providers, and the Department.
The Impact
ThinkPlaceX delivered a clear set of recommendations to guide the Department in designing and implementing a sustainable, system-wide approach to student voice in the NSW VET sector. These included strategies to enhance existing feedback mechanisms, support providers in developing tailored, place-based approaches, and build internal capability within the Department to engage meaningfully with students. We also identified opportunities to foster student-led advocacy and partnership. A shared definition of student voice was developed to establish a unified vision across the sector.
The research base underpinning these recommendations includes key success factors, anticipated long-term impacts, pathways for accessing student voice, and a set of learner archetypes—practical tools that will support the Department’s ongoing implementation and ensure student voice becomes a powerful lever for system transformation
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