Melbourne Polytechnic in the 1970s

The 1970s marked the coming of age for vocational and technical education in Australia. The Commonwealth Government conducted a number of enquiries into the state of VET across the nation during the early part of the decade. Resulting reports, in particular the Kangan Report (1975), recommended sweeping changes across the VET sector, including substantial funding increases and national curricula. The acronym, TAFE, entered the lexicon of Australian education.

Collingwood Technical School finally achieved official recognition as a college and changed its name to Collingwood Technical College in 1970. The College’s student demographic had also significantly changed as a result of national immigration policies and the growth of new technical school in the outer suburbs. By the mid-1970s the CTS catchment area had shrunk to the core inner suburbs of Carlton, Collingwood and Fitzroy and around 68 percent of the student population were either migrants or the children of migrants and comprised approximately 26 non-English speaking nationalities ... a major change from the predominantly Anglo-Celtish student population of the 1950s.

By this time Preston Technical College had become the largest technical education provider in Melbourne’s northern suburbs with a Learning Resource Centre that became the model for VET libraries during the following decade.

Student Enrolments

In 1979, enrolments at Preston Technical College exceeded 10,700 and of these, 890 were full-time students.