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At Shepparton in the Murray electorate of Victoria in 2007, the Federal Liberal Member, Sharman Stone, announced that under a returned Coalition Government, Shepparton ‘would get a stand‐alone technical college’. One year earlier, the Victorian Minister for Education, Lynn Kosky claimed that ‘We lost something when technical schools [the ‘techs’] were closed previously. Yes, the facilities were not great but we lost something that was important to young people’. This article explores the development and demise of ‘South Tech’, Shepparton South Technical School, 1966‐86 to identify the ‘something’ that Kosky claimed was lost, and to argue that technical education is essential in a reconstituted system.

This study aims to identify the key indicators for quality enhancement in an educational institute which affect student’s outcome in terms of employability and entrepreneurship. These indicators can be used for improving the quality of engineering institutions imparting technical education.

Review of conceptual and empirical literature has been done to establish a linkage between institutional factors and quality output. The paper further identifies existing quality gaps in engineering education that make their students misfit to the requirements of market.

The relevant literature reviewed suggests that quality of technical institutions can be viewed form two perspectives: first, students’ achievement in the form of placements, entrepreneurial output, enrollment in higher studies and university ranks. Second, faculty research output in the form of publication in refereed journals, consultancy projects and patents. The study concludes by stating that when these two important stakeholders are provided with the infrastructural support and environment to showcase their skill, the quality of technical institutions improves automatically.

The study is conducted on technical institutions engaged in providing engineering education. This research can be extended to other disciplines.

The framework proposed in the study will help technical institutions in evaluating their service quality levels which will further help them in improving the same.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the restructure of the Victorian Education Department in Australia during the years 1980-1992. It examines how the restructuring of the department resulted in a generational reorganization of secondary schooling. This reorganization culminated in the closure of secondary technical schools that today continues to have enduring effects on access and equity to different types of secondary schooling.

The history is based on documentary and archival research and draws on publications from the State government of Victoria, Education Department/Ministry of Education Annual Reports and Ministerial Statements and Reviews, Teacher Union Archives, Parliamentary Debates and unpublished theses and published works.

As an outcome the restructuring of the Victorian Education Department, schools and the reorganization of secondary schooling, a dual system of secondary schools was abolished. The introduction of a secondary colleges occurred through a process of rationalization of schools and what secondary schooling would entail.

This study traces how, over a decade, eight ministers of education set about to reform education by dismantling and undoing the historical development of Victoria’s distinctive secondary schools system.

The paper aims to discuss current Technical Education scenarios in India. It proposes modelling the factors affecting quality in a technical institute and then applying a suitable technique for assessment, comparison and ranking.

The paper chose graph theoretic approach for quantification of quality-enabled model. Further, the paper has validated the approach by taking examples of institutions and applying the methodology.

The paper provides a systematic methodology to build a quality model for quantification of various factors in a technical institute. The qualitative effect represented in form of a single numerical index is a novel method for such representations. The illustrated methodology in the paper is equally useful for comparison and ranking of a set of institutes.

Because of the chosen factors in the approach, the methodology may not be equally suitable based on type and size of institute and the geographical location.

The paper includes demonstration on application of methodology for comparing the quality in a quantitative manner. The dynamic model allows changing factors and/or their effects as per requirement.

In future, the methodology can be taken up by government/regulatory bodies and can convey the comparisons of institutions to stakeholders including students and parents.

This paper attempts to develop a novel method for comparing quality that can be used by accreditation bodies.

The aim of this study is to investigate the significance of entrepreneurial education on entrepreneurial intention between students of technical and nontechnical higher education institution after exposure to entrepreneurial education.

This study adopts the TPB model and tests the difference in intention between two different samples after they have been exposed to entrepreneurial education. Therefore, the data were analyzed using linear regression and students T-test. Data were collected from students studying at technical and nontechnical higher education institutions in Nigeria at the end of the semester to verify that they have been exposed to entrepreneurial education.

The findings reveal a weak significant relationship between entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial intention among nontechnical students, and no significant relationship was found among technical students after entrepreneurial education exposure. Further findings reveal no significant relationship between entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial intention when the samples are combined.

In response to the volatile economy and uncertain employment opportunities for graduates in Nigeria, the ministry of education and the management of higher education institutions (universities and polytechnics) have to integrate into the entrepreneurial education curriculum change of mindset, needed entrepreneurial skills, capabilities and entrepreneurial competence that is able to nurture the intention of students toward entrepreneurship opportunities identification and exploration in their immediate and extended markets.

This study provides a comprehensive empirical evidence of effectiveness of entrepreneurial education and intention between students with technical and nontechnical education background after entrepreneurial education exposure. This study is among the first that will put the survey timing into consideration. Therefore, fills important gap in the entrepreneurship literature.

The purpose of this paper is to create a hierarchy of critical success factors affecting the higher technical education institutions, taking a case study of India. Using total interpretive structural modeling (TISM), the paper attempts to establish the inter-linkages among ten critical success factors for enhancing the performance of these institutions.

The paper employs Total Interpretive Structural Modeling (TISM) to understand the hierarchy of the factors and their interplay using response from 18 experts in the domain.

The findings reveal that autonomy and accountability coupled with availability of sustainable funds are the driving factors for the success of the institutions. Infrastructural facilities and establishment of centers of excellence act as amplification factors. Introduction of new programs and their accreditation, improvement in faculty quality, research output and improvement in performance of academically weak students emerge as process factors that drive the output factors, namely, academic performance and student placement.

The major limitation of this study is the scope that was limited to 191 institutions, as mandated in the project.

This study has important implications for the institutions as well as the policy makers to channelize their focus and efforts on driving and amplification factors that would ultimately lead to enhanced performance of the next generation higher technical education institutions.

This paper is a part of pan India project carried out to assess the performance of higher technical education institutions in India.

Technical education in Poland has a relatively long history. The first craft school was established in Opole in 1761 and, by the end of the 19th century, at least a dozen technical schools had been opened in various parts of the country. In 1937/38 there were some 110 000 pupils in craft schools and over 7000 in secondary technical schools.

This paper aims to discuss students’ assessment of quality related issues in engineering education in India.

The paper uses primary survey data of 1,178 undergraduate engineering students in Delhi, India, in 2009-2010. Students’ experience and views of four important aspects such as teaching methods used in the classroom, evaluation pattern, skills acquired by students during the course and the involvement of students in different activities other than classroom teaching are discussed using descriptive statistics and correlation to examine the quality issues.

The study finds that the lecture method is still dominant in the teaching and learning of engineering institutions compared to technical demonstration and laboratory work. Around half of the engineering students reported that they had never gone through any field work or industrial visits during their entire program of study. Involvement of students in the activities other than classroom teaching (e.g. working on research projects, attending engineering internships, studying a foreign language and opting for interdisciplinary courses) is more prevalent in government institutions compared to private institutions. The findings suggest that engineering institutions (particularly private colleges) should change their focus from traditional methods of teaching and evaluation of students to interactive methods of learning to improve the quality of technical education in India.

The literature reveals that the quality assessment of engineering and technical education in India is largely based on the information collected from stakeholders other than students. Therefore, this study contributes a new dimension to the existing literature by considering students’ assessment of the quality of engineering education.

Just before Christmas of 1970 I received a letter from a French friend who had enabled me during the period 1950–1960 to visit, in Paris, many of the new Industrial Complementary Courses which were being built up as part of the French post‐war drive to restore and advance the nation's industrial life after the sad years of the Occupation. These Industrial Complementary Courses represented the lowest level of technical education and recruited, in a fairly wide field of preparation for skilled factory work, boys and girls who, by their teachers, were regarded as some of the least able pupils. They were not educationally subnormal, and they were not those of the absolutely bottom stratum, academically speaking, but they were boys and girls for whom, in the academic eyes of the average secondary school teacher, normal bookish secondary schooling was impossible. The three years of Industrial Complementary schooling were a post‐primary alternative to any of the other forms of education from the age of 12 to the school‐leaving age of 15 years. The youngsters concerned had already shown that in the bookish studies which had hitherto constituted the bulk of their schooling, they were either thoroughly incompetent or had reached the stage of utter boredom and lack of interest. So, for them, there were now these various dust‐bins provided, under the heading Manual and Industrial.

In the 1980s, the Chinese government undertook a major structural reform in education by which upper secondary education was converted from predominantly general education to an equal mix of general education and vocational/technical education. A critical examination is provided of the rationale for and implementation strategies of the reform, framed in a broader context of the development of secondary education in the past four decades. It points out that, although the reform was justified in largely economic terms, there is actually little empirical support for the economic assumptions; the development of vocational/technical education is prompted more by a desire to reduce the social demand for higher education and to use education as a social stratification device. The reform reflects changing perspectives of the Chinese leadership on the role of education in national development; and it can be seen as the outcome of the most recent episode of continuing social and political conflicts in the Chinese state that began in the 1950s.