the timing of technical schools demise co-incided with the need to re-build/re-tool secondary schools.
the few remaining apprenticeships were going to more highly credentialled high school students.
Technical schools were not providing the basics they were established to do.

however, in 1994 in the midst of re-building the schools…recall Joan Kirner had peacefully closed or amalgamated 34 techs/high schools during 1993, Jeff Kennett arrived, slashing and burning over 200 schools, and selling them through the likes of the now leader Ballieu

give credit where it is due….Uncle Don Hayward staved the working class areas, sold the schools and boosted the already priveleged (liberal electorate) eastern suburbs schools..all this is a matter of documented fact and has been well publicised.
The current government has belatedly recognised the necessity to re-build the school building stocks.

The starting matra of VCE in 1992 was to fully equip all schools as secondary colleges..unfortunately Don Hayward ripped that promise apart and re-enforced the old high school academic model, which we still have just HSC re-badged…with an unsustainable focus on getting into Melbourne University as a first priority and anything else is a second best..even now 25 years later!!
The more things change…it will be of interest with the national curriculum whether the academics will ever recognise there are greater needs for a schooling system rather than tertiary entry

bitter and twisted..you betcha!
along with many thousands of others with long memories and an interest in education without privilege or favour

As a writer I may not be in the same league as Patrick White, but I can communicate with the written word thanks to some very formidable female English teachers. They knew exactly how to control and motivate recalcitrant sixteen and seventeen year old boys like myself.

Amongst many other things I can fix a car, unblock a drain, repair a fuse and program computer in about six different languages. None of them English. I must admit I didn’t learn computer programming at tech as. The abacus was pretty much the standard in those days. The tech educated me in a way where I have easily adapted to new technology. My father also went to a tech. He learnt to use a PC when he was 78. He does all his banking and share portfolio for his super fund and is now 83. It’s a pity tech schools were flawed as some high school educated “expert” wrote in The Age some years ago. Just think what we could have been if they weren’t.

They didn’t close techs because they thought they were working class ghettos and it was not because they thought that the trades were dead and that everyone would work for a bank. Although it is a pity banks discovered that computers and ATM’s could do it all and that the drains still needed unblocking and the fuses repairing.

The real reason is they thought they could save money, to bribe the electorate with tax cuts. The people who thought this up were of course accountants and lawyers. All high school trained.