The workshop series International Dialogue on Education Berlin is a joint initiative of the British Council Germany, the German Academic Exchange Service, the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Australian Group of Eight and the Canadian Bureau for International Education in Berlin.
Through the contributions of international participants the series aims to enrich the debate on science, research and higher education policy in Germany, to place German perspectives in a global context and to learn from positive examples from other countries.
Workshop 1 - Australia
'Life-long learning in Australia: setting parameters for global comparisons'
For Australia, Life Long Learning as a new policy issue emerged in the fast changing world of the final quarter of the 20th century.
But this does not mean that universities have not historically taken students at different stages of life and with quite different levels of formal education. In fact, during the course of their history, the majority of Australian universities have drawn their students from a great diversity of backgrounds.
The University of Western Australia (UWA) for instance, established just before the First World War as a free university, encouraged the enrolment of women from the beginning so that in its earliest decades more than half its students were women and by 1929 nearly twenty per cent of its graduands were married women. Like other Australian universities, it also took in students of different ages and different backgrounds in the years immediately following the Second World War under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme. Hence the student body in the 1950s included many returning service men – some to resume their studies, some to take up tertiary education for the first time, and still others going into post graduate studies for a variety of different reasons.
Then, following the abolition of all university fees in 1974 by the reformist Whitlam Labor Government, mature age students from diverse backgrounds entered Australian universities in large numbers during the 1970s and 80s. This too was a time when child-care facilities were established at many universities; at UWA the first was established in 1972, thus enabling women with small children to attend university.
These people clearly fulfil the definition of what we might today think of as Life-long learners, or what is a common Australian term, ‘'mature age students’'. During his term as Chair of Universities Australia last year, Professor Alan Robson introduced a new term, which gained immediate currency: '‘second-chance students'.
The policy issue arises largely because in many of the universities in Australia, particularly in the research intensive Go8, developments since the 1950s have dramatically prioritised school leavers in their admissions process. This means that increasingly, universities have become places where you go immediately after school rather than places to return to again and again to learn a relevant skill. So in some ways, life long learning is about redefining the very nature of universities as social institutions.
With that in mind, the workshop will address (a) the importance of life long learning within the context of equity and diversity discourses in contemporary Australia, particularly for Go8 universities such as UWA; and (b) identifies some of the common practices and problems around recruiting and supporting ‘second chance’ or ‘mature age’ students.
