A reflective account of the VET FEE-HELP initiative as a driver of ethical dilemmas for vocational education teachers in Australia Sonal Nakar 1 • Richard G. Bagnall 1 • Steven Hodge 1 Received: 13 April 2016 / Accepted: 23 January 2018 Ó The Australian Association for Research in Education, Inc. 2018 Abstract This paper reviews the nature and implementation of the Australian VET FEE-HELP (VFH) policy initiative: a scheme introduced in 2008 to extend income- contingent loans to the vocational education and training (VET) sector in Australia. We argue that the implementation of the scheme has been seriously flawed, leading to a range of counter-educational and unethical practices on the part of some VET providers. An ongoing research project into the impact of the changing contem- porary cultural context of VET on the creation of moral dilemmas facing VET teachers in their work has identified four dilemmas that were seen by teachers to be significantly driven by the VFH scheme. Those dilemmas arose from (1) unethical student recruitment and enrolment practices, (2) overlooking traditional educational standards, (3) constraining teacher responsiveness and (4) manipulating learning assessment. The identifying teachers saw themselves as being professionally unprepared to handle such moral dilemmas, leading to discomfort and inappropriate handling of the dilemmas. Keywords Vocational education and training Á VET FEE-HELP Á Quality education Á Teacher dilemma Á Unethical practices Á Ethical dilemma & Sonal Nakar s.nakar@griffith.edu.au Richard G. Bagnall r.bagnall@griffith.edu.au Steven Hodge s.hodge@griffith.edu.au 1 School of Education and Professional Studies, Griffith University, Mt Gravatt Campus, 176 Messines Ridge Road, Mt Gravatt, QLD 4122, Australia 123 Aust. Educ. Res. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-018-0257-z