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ItemLooking into "A BLACK BOX" - vocational education and training for international students in private registered training organisations in Melbourne, Australia( 2014)This study investigated and analysed situated realities influencing international students’ outcomes in seven commercial for profit private Vocational Education and Training (VET) providers in Melbourne, Australia. It draws from the notions of social structure – a system of human relations – as its theoretical and analytical lens to explore how the restructuring of the VET system using the competitive training market model in Australia reorganised the way it is understood and practised. The study shows that commercial for profit private VET providers operating in a competitive VET market mostly emphasise profit imperatives and education-migration policy frameworks to conceptualise and define international students’ characteristics, expectations, learning and educational outcomes. The study used a mixed methodology consisting of both quantitative and qualitative techniques to gather data in seven research sites in Melbourne. It used a longitudinal survey of international students; in-depth interviews of training managers and quality assurance auditors; and a survey of vocational teachers to gather the research data. General systems theory and interpretive approaches were used to analyse these data. The findings were triangulated to form core themes and sub themes comprising the contexts of delivery and assessments, international students’ characteristics and outcomes, and teacher pedagogic practices and perceptions. The study offers a basis for understanding how the intertwined, complex and situated mechanisms in a market model for VET combine to influence international students’ outcomes and skills training in general. It shows that when international VET students’ purposes for undertaking VET in Australia are divergent and shifting, the competitive training market model policy dimensions, which frame their participation, are mostly neither aligned nor congruent with the students’ expectations and aspirations for participating. Most international students’ educational and employment aspirations were not met; their prior employment and educational experiences were not emphasised; they were narrowly represented, conceptualised and defined in migration terms; and most of them were working in jobs unrelated to their training. It further shows that the situated factors influencing international students’ outcomes in commercial for profit private VET RTOs in the study are interconnected with the market model for VET, policy imperatives, international students’ characteristics and aspirations and the market-based environmental demands. Hence these factors, particularly the way international students and their providers are represented in the education-migration discourses and the way courses are delivered, cannot be understood in isolation. By implication, the construction of educational policy frameworks, which enable the naming of values inherent in the training packages model, must include international students’ learning contexts, expectations and purposes for studying in commercial for profit private VET providers. But, this cannot be achieved in a training environment where perceptions about the skills, knowledge and work-readiness of the graduates from this sector are viewed to be inconsistent with what their qualifications claim they have. Hence, policy makers and educators must reconstruct the purposes of VET outside the education-migration framework to include the internationalised VET cohorts’ educational and employment expectations and aspirations. Overall, the study shows that policy imperatives (interpretation and reinterpretation of policy), training packages implementation, teacher pedagogic choices and teaching and learning resources in a business environment influenced commercial for profit private VET provider contexts in the study, particularly international students’ aspirations, experiences and outcomes. Whilst some international students used VET as a pathway into higher education, to get a job in their field of training, to build and broaden their knowledge and skills and to improve their credentials with the hope to gain a better future, most of them made these choices at a severe cost to their aspirations and goals. By implication, the competitive VET market system elements may not be congruent with the other components of the education system and that the other components of the system do not support each other. Hence the study argues that international students and commercial for profit private VET providers’ contribution can only be more clearly understood and more substantially recognised if their characteristics, relationships in the delivery contexts and the discourses informing their participation are comprehensively mapped and analysed.