Courses

The range of courses offered at the Glebe site developed over time. The diagrams by archivist Julia Mant show the way the courses at Glebe changed over time. 

When the Co-operative began in 1957, Alf Clint established the Tranby site as a hostel for young people from rural co-operatives so they could stay there while they did apprenticeships. These co-operatives were on Moa Island (in the Torres Straits), at Lockhardt River, Clump Mountain and Yarabah (all in North Queensland) and at Cabbage Tree Island, in the Richmond River near Lismore in NSW. From 1960, Summer Schools were offered on cooperative management and organisational strategies. From 1962, short but ongoing courses were offered for cooperative members including bookkeeping skills.

Under Kevin Cook as General Secretary, from 1981 to 1997, Tranby developed new courses as it responded to student interests, drawing on expanded Federal funding environments after the Federal Australian Labor Party (ALP) had been in power in the early 1970s and the State ALP held power in NSW during much of the 1980s.

Kevin Cook and Tranby remained committed, however, to education in the community and there were many courses run, often through the ADU, with learners from communities and teaching staff either recruited from community elders or from Tranby teachers. See the Learning in Community section for the NOW! Course and the Learning on the Job section for the Boomerang Factory and the ADU.

Funding

Before 1980, under Alf Clint’s direction, all the funding for Tranby Co-op came from supportive unions and the Australian Board of Missions. After 1980, when Kevin Cook became General Secretary, a more supportive Commonwealth Department of Education – ComEd – funded Tranby for some teaching staff, while students could access AbStudy scholarships for their living expenses, a crucial need for adult students. All other costs – like administrative staff and running costs – came from unions like the Maritime Union (formerly the Australian Seamen’s Union and the Waterside Workers Federation). 

In the mid-1980s, under Neville Wran’s State Labor Government, the Technical and Further Education Department (TAFE) began to fund whole courses – that is, not only teaching staff but running costs. But Tranby found this led to unwanted controls over their teaching methods and course content. Kevin explained this in conversation with Chrissie Kerr, who became Tranby office manager and teacher in the early 1990s: 

Cookie - We’d have someone come out and tell us how we had to teach the course, and we refused to do that.  And they all went “If you don’t do it this way, then you don’t get any money.” 
So we were always under the strap of, you know, conforming to their way of thinking and it wasn’t Tranby’s way of thinking!
We decided that the only way out of it was to get out of TAFE funding. And so that we had to design our own courses and get them accredited through VTAB (Vocational Education and Training Accreditation Board) and that meant bringing in new people, looking out for new money.

Chris - Yeah, it was an irony! Kim McConville was employed through Tranby to pull together the Advanced Diploma of Applied Aboriginal Studies and she had done a great job. You had all of these Elders involved, everybody working with Kim on getting the content right and the delivery structure of it right. I remember Aunty Is (Isabel Flick) saying, ‘We want this to be delivered!’. 
And then the first time it went up to VTAB, they didn’t accredit it! They said “No, no, you know it has to look like this and behave like this!’
It always struck me so extraordinary that a non-Aboriginal bureaucracy would say “That’s inappropriate.”
But Kim reworked it in such a way to still maintain the integrity of it, but to get it through VTAB!’

- Kevin Cook talking with staff member, Chrissie Kerr, 4 Sept 2005