Leslie Martin had a long career in physics before chairing this committee from which CAEs were produced. Source: Encyclopaedia of Australian Science and Innovation.
The report: Tertiary Education in Australia became known as the Martin Report, named after the chair of the committee appointed to produce it, physicist Leslie Martin. The committee began work in 1961, and submitted the first two volumes of its report in 1964 and 1965, including all its recommendations, to the Australian Universities Commission that had been established following the earlier Murray Report. Of the committee members, one of the more significant was Peter Karmel, an economist, who brought issues around the relationship between higher education and economic productivity into the argument about future planning (Connell, 1993, pp. 69-72).
The problems to be addressed
The committee was faced with an ever increasing demand for places in higher education and the need to plan ways of meeting it. The committee accepted the view that higher education should be available to all citizens in accordance with their inclinations and capacity, and recognised that the expansion of knowledge and growth of technology made more higher education across many occupational fields an essential condition of social stability and progress. In recommending an expansion in the range of higher educational opportunities it relied heavily on the argument that education is a profitable form of social investment, part of “human capital” theory. [See Glossary below.] This approach was consolidated in a later report by Bruce Williams (1979). Hannah Forsyth (2014) puts it this way: It marked “a real change in the ways that the government was assessing the need for education. Before this, education was assumed to be a right possessed by the individual citizen, based on merit, Now it was a question of economic and demographic trends” (p. 98).
The recommendations
The most important recommendation of the Martin Committee was for an expansion in the amount and variety of tertiary education in Australia. In particular it recommended that teacher education receive Commonwealth financial support and be brought under the control of autonomous Boards of Teacher Education in each state and that Institutes of Colleges be established in each state to extend the scope and status of tertiary technical education. The committee also made detailed recommendations for changes in agricultural, management, legal, medical, armed services and theological education in Australia. This development was to be coordinated by extending the Australian Universities Commission to become an Australian Tertiary Education Commission.
The Commonwealth government of the time did not accept the idea of a unified tertiary commission, establishing a new Australian Commission on Advanced Education instead. Similarly there was reluctance to accept the recommendations concerning the full assumption of responsibility for teacher education. Nevertheless there was agreement that new and existing institutions of tertiary education apart from the universities needed to be planned for, expanded, and funded more satisfactorily with improvements in their governance.
Colleges of Advanced Education (CAE)
A new CAE for Townsville (Queensland) following the Martin Report, aerial view 1970. Source: Townsville City Council.
The outstanding result of the Martin Committee’s report was the expansion of colleges of advanced education in every state. They provided for both technological education and tertiary education in fields such as the paramedical, outside the scope of universities at the time.
These institutions provided tertiary education, usually vocational in nature. They were distinguished from universities by their orientation towards direct vocational preparation and teaching rather than “pure knowledge” and research. (These distinctions were much less clear, even redundant, by the end of the twentieth century.) Initially many of the CAE courses of study led to certificates and diplomas rather than degrees. Postgraduate work in the CAEs included larger proportions of coursework than the research that was usual in the universities.
The Applied Art Building in the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 1957. The CAE revolution would see sweeping changes as older institutions were incorporated into new entities. Source: RMIT Archive of photographs.
The term “CAE” became increasingly used as older institutions adapted and newer ones were founded. Some of the older institutes of technology, for example The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, retained their earlier names. Teachers colleges did become CAEs or were absorbed into larger institutions (for example Bedford Park Teachers College in South Australia into Sturt CAE). A newly formed Tasmanian College of Advanced Education incorporated teachers colleges, technical departments and other institutions into two centres. Separate and specialist schools in pharmacy, nursing, occupational therapy and physiotherapy, continued to exist. Nevertheless the tendency in educational policy was to amalgamate and incorporate smaller CAEs and institutes into larger ones. The early history of this process was to see many multi-campus CAEs as older, smaller institutions were gathered together.
The South Australian experience of this process is instructive. In the 1960s there had been Adelaide, Western, Salisbury, Bedford Park and Wattle Park teachers colleges. There was also Roseworthy Agricultural College and the Institute of Technology. The amalgamations into various CAE complexes was ongoing. The South Australian College of Advanced Education (SACAE) was created in 1982 by the merger of an earlier CAE group: the Adelaide College of the Arts and Education (Adelaide and Underdale CAEs); Hartley CAE (Magill); Salisbury CAE (Salisbury East) and Sturt CAE (Bedford Park). The story continued in the later Dawkins era (from the late 1980s) with universities caught up in the rearrangements. The Adelaide SACAE campus became part of the University of Adelaide, and the Sturt SACAE campus became part of Flinders University. In 1991, the Magill, Salisbury and Underdale campuses of SACAE merged with the South Australian Institute of Technology to form the University of South Australia.
Significance and results
A long-lasting era of reform and restructure in educational institutions and arrangements had begun, and the Martin Committee Report was a highly significant starting point for the process. By 1971 there were 43 CAEs in Australia including agricultural colleges and para-medical schools.
In hindsight the emergence of this “new order” in tertiary education was rather temporary. The Hawke Keating Labor government came to power in 1983, and by 1987 John Dawkins was appointed a “super-minister” for the portfolio Employment, Education and Training. In 1988 Dawkins produced a white paper Higher Education: A Policy Statement, that argued for a unified national system of tertiary education. The CAEs, the institutions produced from the Martin Committee, would become new universities or be absorbed into the older universities. The Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the RMIT University, the University of South Australia (UniSA) and many others owed their early twenty-first century forms to this process. Departments of education in the older universities were often expanded to incorporate those parts of the earlier CAEs that were responsible for teacher education.
To a degree the Martin Report retained an argument for the cultural, citizenship-making and democratic functions of higher education. Nevertheless the main argument became that of “economic instrumentalism”. P. H. Partridge (1965) in an early response to the Report thought that in the public sphere the link between economic growth and increasing levels of investment in education had become an article of faith (cited in Marginson, 1993, p. 43).
Glossary
Human capital theory proposes that education, training, and health are investments that increase an individual’s productivity and future earnings. It views people as economic assets whose skills and knowledge function like physical capital (e.g., machinery) in driving economic growth and personal income.
Note: This entry expands and updates the paragraphs written by the late John McLaren (with his consent), in his A Dictionary of Australian Education (1974).