Peter Noonan was a rare person with expertise across vocational and higher education, and an even rarer person who made significant policy contributions to both. Sadly he passed away in 2022 at the age of 67.

Rethinking Tertiary Education, co-edited by Peter Dawkins, Megan Lilly and Robert Pascoe, with sixteen others as co-authors, is billed as ‘building on the work of Peter Noonan’, and does so by exploring ways of making the component parts of Australia’s formal education sector – especially higher education and vocational education, but also schools – work together more smoothly than now. Pascoe also contributes an interesting biographical chapter on Noonan.

For historical and political reasons the vocational and higher education systems in Australia have quite sharp dividing lines in the nature of the qualifications they deliver, how they are funded, how they are taught, and with some exceptions the occupations they support. The book also looks at school credentials, especially the idea that they don’t measure all they should.

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