History
According to the Australian constitution, education is the responsibility of the state and territory governments; although the federal government does partially fund private schools, vocational and higher education. Vocational education funding however was previously funnelled through the states and territories. These colleges' direct federal funding is thus unusual for this reason alone. Their appearance was part of the breakdown of cooperative federalism caused by the increasing centralism of the Howard government and party-political differences with the state and territory governments. Another expression of this was the demise of the former Australian National Training Authority (ANTA) which expressed the political and industrial settlement on training of the 1990s.
In 2005, the federal government chose the areas in which these schools were to be established, then advertised for tenders. Some successful tenderers were state or territory governments, others were church groups, others were for-profit companies. Some were combinations of these. Thus some resulting ATCs were government schools, while others are private schools that are predominantly government funded, and at least one exists as a campus-within-a-campus at a state school and a church school. Such a mixed sectoral body of schools had not existed in Australia before, nor had any government founded a private school. Both these firsts also make the colleges unusual.
Read more about this topic: Australian Technical Colleges
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)