Source: Australian Education Union
04 February 2025
On average, one Australian woman is killed every week by a partner or former partner. Male perpetrators are also responsible for 95 per cent of violence against men and 94 per cent against women.
Primary prevention organisation Our Watch aims to stop gendered violence before it starts, by targeting the underlying “cultures of gender inequality, sexism and disrespect” that CEO Patty Kinnersly explains are “prevalent and normalised across our communities – including within our education systems”.
TAFE “can be part of the change,” Kinnersly says, “by challenging gender stereotypes, such as encouraging more women to take trade roles and more men to take caring roles – and by ensuring educational workplaces are safe and equal for all genders”.
Our Watch has developed an evidence-based, step-by-step framework for TAFE called Respect and Equality. Between 2019 and 2021, Our Watch refined the framework through pilot partnerships at five VET institutions in Victoria.
Now the program is rolling out nationwide, driven by new ‘positive-duty’ legislation requiring TAFE to proactively guard against discrimination and violence, rather than responding after it occurs. Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT), the ACT’s largest public vocational education provider, was the first TAFE outside Victoria to undertake a Respect and Equality framework partnership.
The whole-of-institution challenge
Gender equity is easy for TAFE to endorse in principle, and some institutes already have some relevant policies or staff training programs, but at a whole-of-institution level, it’s harder to generate “real, actionable commitments to making meaningful progress”, says Terra Starbird, CIT’s assistant director of workplace inclusion.
While developing Respect and Equality, Our Watch had noticed the ad-hoc nature of equity initiatives across TAFE. Different departments might act independently without talking to each other. Or individual staffers might be personally dedicated to creating an equitable working and learning environment but lack the seniority to galvanise wider change. If those people leave, their institutional knowledge and change-making impetus leave with them.
“Intentionality in this work is so important,” Starbird says, “as it ensures that our efforts are deliberate, tangible, focused, and monitored, while effectively tackling the issues.”
CIT began its Respect and Equality journey in 2023 with a plan to have an active Gender Equity Action Plan (GEAP) in place by 1 July 2024, as an ACT Public Service requirement. Starbird and her colleagues found Respect and Equality “a natural fit” because its “structured, best-practice approach” allowed CIT to develop a GEAP that was “tailored to our unique vocational education context”.
Step 1
Establish a cross-institutional working group
Respect and Equality simultaneously considers five domains where TAFE can set standards for positive behaviours: as a workplace; among students; in teaching and learning; in industry and community relations; and in communications.
Over a series of six meetings, Our Watch facilitators help the TAFE induct, train and guide a working group that integrates expertise from senior executives, business operations, HR, marketing and communications, educators and student services. Starbird coordinated CIT’s Gender Equity Working Group alongside her colleague Sam Launt, CIT’s inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA) coordinator.
“Our working group was diverse, with staff from all walks of life and across all domains of CIT,” says Starbird. “It is this diversity of lived experience, expertise, and perspectives that genuinely enriched and made this GEAP something we are all immensely proud of.”
Kinnersly says a key function of the working group is “getting leadership buy-in”, because real change happens when TAFE leaders are involved as ‘sponsors’ of gender equity from the very beginning.
But for Starbird, the real value of the cross-institute approach was “ensuring that we contextualised actions for each domain and spoke to the individuals who would be doing the work, rather than applying a top-down or blanket approach”. She calls these people “champions” – those who “drive the work, empower others by showing how it can be contextualised for different settings, and celebrate best practice”.
She’s particularly proud of liaising with the CIT Student Association (CITSA) to ensure students participated in the working group, and strongly recommends other TAFE institutes do the same from the outset. “Involving students is best practice and widely used in the university sector; however, this is still an emerging practice in the vocational education sector.”
Step 2
Self-assessment of current practices
“The first step of any meaningful change is reflection,” Starbird says. So, in late 2023, the Gender Equity Working Group took an honest look across the institution to understand current attitudes and actions towards gender equity. “This included existing practices, policies, programs, resources, and initiatives.”
The working group used Our Watch’s self-assessment tool to evaluate the picture they’d assembled. They measured CIT’s equity practices against a series of goals for TAFE, which Our Watch had previously established in partnership with Victorian TAFE institutes during Respect and Equality’s pilot phase.
This process took approximately six months and overlapped with CIT’s development of its next Reconciliation Action Plan. This encouraged the working group to consider inclusion activities through an intersectional lens, building more valuable cross-institutional connections.
For Starbird, the self-assessment is a hugely important part of the process – and she would not recommend rushing it: “It will let you know where you are, including where you are excelling and areas for improvement.”
Crucially, it identified CIT’s quiet achievers: “That some areas and individual staff were undertaking great, industry-leading work in the gender equity space, which was not widely known across CIT.” These champions became role models “to support other people that were earlier on in their gender equity journey”.
Step 3
Develop a Gender Equity Action Plan
The CIT working group spent several co-development sessions drafting its GEAP with the support of Our Watch, beginning by imagining an absolutely aspirational action plan with no restrictions on budget, time or resources. Then the group began to reintroduce practical limitations, balancing CIT’s strategic priorities with the strengths and weaknesses identified during the self-assessment phase.
They also met with staff in key areas who would be responsible for actually delivering the plan’s proposed actions, “to ensure they were feasible, sustainable, and impactful”.
This is where the framework’s holistic nature really revealed its worth. “The importance of a whole-of-institute approach and using genuinely consultative co-design methods cannot be overstated and was instrumental in CIT being able to achieve a completed GEAP,” says Starbird.
The plan takes proactive steps to prevent discrimination in three main ways. It embeds equity into CIT’s policies, resources, structures, and processes. It empowers staff and students to be “everyday allies and champions for gender equity”. And it helps CIT better understand and monitor gender-based inequity, harassment, bullying and violence – and better support staff and students who’ve experienced it.
Says Starbird: “It is our roadmap for meaningful change that will continue to build as we learn, upskill, and roll up our sleeves to do the work ahead.”
Step 4
Implement and monitor the GEAP
CIT’s GEAP only launched in September 2024, and while it’s still early days for Starbird one unexpected benefit of Respect and Equality has been the increased sense of community and shared purpose it’s fostered among participants – both working group members and those who were consulted during the self-assessment stage.
“We were able to find other allies in this process, some of whom have since joined the working group. The initiative helped build stronger connections to CIT’s broader strategic goals in the inclusion and equity space,” she says.
The GEAP forms a benchmark for CIT’s longer-term progress. Starbird says that over the next two years, the changes set out in the plan will be adopted incrementally, “with ongoing reviews to gauge effectiveness and adapt as needed”.
One finding during CIT’s self-assessment was that the institute needed to engage with data more meaningfully. So, as part of implementing the plan, CIT will “improve how we collect, monitor, and report on data and use this data to make long-term, sustainable plans, ensuring we provide ongoing professional development to support all staff in this endeavour”.
For Our Watch CEO Kinnersly, the benefits of the Respect and Equality framework are clear: “It means creating a work environment where staff at CIT feel safe, valued and respected and where we foster respectful learning environments that attract and retain students to address critical skill shortages.”
As part of the national rollout, Our Watch has created an online community of practice where the TAFE institutes that have participated in Respect and Equality can share insights, challenges and surprises from their common VET context, borrow approaches from each other and build mutual support on what will be a long and bumpy road to equity.
“No single GEAP is going to ‘fix’ gender equity overnight, nor should you expect to achieve perfection in your first GEAP,” says Starbird. “For anyone who asks when this work will be finished, my reply is this: when we live in a society free from all gender-based violence and discrimination.
“Until then, we will keep working together to be part of the solution, as this is going to take the contribution of all of us across all sectors of society.”
Mel Campbell
This article was originally published in The Australian TAFE Teacher, Spring 2024
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