Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemThe system of payment by results in Victorian elementary schools, 1864-1905( 1977)"Payment by results" was a system used to determine teachers' salaries, in full or in part, in some parts of the world in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was originally conceived in England by Robert Lowe, Vice-President of the Education Department, and incorporated in regulations issued in 1861. These regulations led to considerable dispute but reappeared, in a slightly modified form, in the Revised Code of 1862. The system came to an end in England in 1897 but at the turn of the century still remained in Mauritius and Victoria. It was first proposed in Victoria in 1862 by the Premier, (Sir) John O'Shanassy but was firmly rejected by the Legislative Assembly. Nevertheless a modified version came into operation in 1864. The Board of Education, newly created under the Common Schools Act was responsible for this. Whether O'Shanassy put covert pressure on this Board whose members were appointed by his Ministry is open to conjecture. Certainly at the time a large number of people, inside and outside Parliament, thought so. Educationists and historians have tended to view the system as something of a curio. However its ramifications were so great that it has to be viewed more seriously. The system lasted in Victoria for forty-one years - almost one-third of the history of the State - and therefore cannot be lightly dismissed. Not wanted in the first place, it nevertheless remained in operation until the end of 1905. It survived Royal Commissions, newspaper campaigns, political criticism, opposition from teachers, educationists, and the general public. However its grip on Victorian elementary education was broken only when the forces of change, heralded by the "New Education" towards the end of the nineteenth century, made it an anachronism.
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ItemOrigins of the Victorian Apprenticeship Commission: a history of apprenticeship regulation in Victoria 1896-1927( 1970)By the eighteen nineties, factory methods had encouraged looseness or avoidance of apprenticeship contracts. The improver system, under which employers were not responsible for teaching, flourished. Youths grew up insufficiently skilled to command full tradesman's pay, thus threatening adult jobs and wages. In 1896, following anti-sweating agitation, wages boards were established to determine minimum rates and maximum numbers of juveniles in certain seriously exploited trades. By 1900, this system was extended to other trades, but the minimum duration of apprenticeship contracts was set at only one year. Because employers resented limitation, wages boards in 1903 lost the power to fix the proportion of apprentices; but in compensation an apprentice was redefined as one bound to be taught for at least three years. Nevertheless, without adequate means of training, adequate definition of trade skills, or an adequate tribunal, the situation remained unsatisfactory. Trade classes were developed to supplement workshop experience, but they had little effect. In 1907 a Conference recommended that an Apprenticeship Commission take control of certain skilled trades and establish the numbers to be admitted as apprentices, their wages, and the goals and methods of their training, including technical education. Improvers would be excluded from those trades. Although wages boards gained power to prescribe indentures in 1909, and regained their limitation powers in 1910, when Bills to establish a Commission were presented in 1911 and 1912, both the form of the proposals and the antagonism of employers resulted in their rejection. A second Conference in 1911 recommended that apprenticeship be left to the wages boards. Between 1911 and 1921, the Federal Arbitration Court improved apprenticeship conditions in some trades; the technical school system developed its capacity, especially in preparatory work; and a Repatriation Training Scheme adopted organisational machinery similar to that proposed in 1907.
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ItemThe Victorian agricultural high schools : origins, development and failure: with special reference to Ballarat, Sale, Shepparton and Wangaratta agricultural high schools( 1977)The concept of the vocational secondary school is not unique to Victoria and, as in other places, the questions of its origin, development and success or failure are integrally tied to the political, social and economic conditions of its environment. The agricultural high schools of Victoria, established in the first decade of this century, were not, as some would have us believe, poorly considered experiments proposed by a few optimistic educators in a fledgling State which provided education for its children only up to grade six level. Rather, they represented the first major move by an ambitious young Director of Education, Frank Tate, into a field hitherto dominated by independent interests. That they were vocational, that they were rural, was determined by the political and economic realities of the time: that they were failures was determined by the liberal philosophies and, therefore, approach of Tate and other department men, and by the social realities in a State where industrialization and resultant social mobility militated against any attempt to keep the boys "down on the farm". Poorly constructed, and unwanted by the rural populace, the vocational aspect of the agricultural high schools was, in the main, dysfunctional to the composition of Victorian society, and the thinly veiled contempt of the Education Department could be seen in the words and deeds of its administrators. But they had to pay lip-service to their political masters, and the façade was necessarily maintained until long after the passing of the 1910 Education Act, the composition of which, had Tate been so allowed, would have brought to fruition his dream of a large and integrated State secondary system. When it finally disappeared from the Victorian educational scene, the agricultural course was lamented by few. It had been, however, the necessary medium through which the initial steps along the road to a State-wide system of secondary education had been taken. The schools lived on, as district high schools, and helped to provide the model for that system.