A war on TAFE? Some VET facts and myths.

Recently again, my news feeds, social media and other outlets have been jammed with the AEU, Greens and Labor people talking about the war on TAFE and that non-public providers are causing the death of TAFEs in Australia.  To be fair I understand what is going on here;

1. A not insubstantial number of AEU members in various states are TAFE workers.  In fact the overwhelming majority of AEU members from the VET sector come from TAFE.  It therefore makes sense that the AEU vigorously pushes the TAFE bandwagon.  Less TAFE staff means (probably) less AEU members, making them a less relevant voice in the VET sector.
2. The Greens with their deep ideological commitments to public provision of a wide range of things including education and a VET policy that says no funding should go to non-public providers at all, coupled with a solid understanding of their voting base, means that there is a war on TAFE, resonates with their political agenda and makes them more palatable to their voters.
3. Labour.  Well with deep connections to the Union movement, a lean towards the left, and again a good understanding of their ‘true believers’ talking up the death of TAFE makes sense.  It also helps that they can use it to kick the government as well.

The fact that these are the main groups behind the various save our TAFEs movements makes it pretty clear that a lot of the rhetoric around this and a lot of the negative press leveled at the non-public side of VET is, well, driven by political and ideological agendas.

Now two things before I go on.  Firstly let me make it abundantly clear that the position taken by the government and its advisory groups are, just as much as with the groups above, driven by ideological and political agendas.  Secondly, as I have said so many times before, we need to have a strong efficient and effective public VET education system in this country, losing it would be a loss for Australia.  However, we also need a vibrant and well supported non-public system as well.

Let us then jump away from the rhetoric and agendas and just look at some facts however, and then perhaps we can make some considered conclusions about some of the recent rhetoric.  Now bear in mind these facts have come from data publicly released by NCVER.

Myth Number One: Private RTOs have grown out of control.

Fact Number One:  A small number of private providers (and some TAFEs) substantially increased their enrolments mostly on the back of the flawed VET fee help scheme.  However 47% of all non-public VET providers have less than 1,000 Students.

Myth Number Two: TAFE provides a far better quality of training than non-public providers.

Fact Number Two:  If we look at the Employers’ use and views of the VET system 2017 report from NCVER we can see that Employers report a 91.5% satisfaction with private providers against 85.6% with TAFE as well as an 82.9% satisfaction rate for the delivery to apprentices and trainees as opposed to 81.8% for TAFE.

Myth Number Three: Private providers cherry pick students and courses and leave TAFE to do the heavy lifting with remote, disadvantaged, disabled and indigenous students.

Fact Number Three:  Private providers actually deliver to 50% of all indigenous students, 43% of all students with a disability, 54% of the most disadvantaged students, and more than half of all remote and very remote students.

Myth Number Four: TAFE does the vast majority of the training of trainees and apprentices.

Fact Number Four: Non-public providers delivered 45% of apprentice and trainee enrollments.

So I am just going to leave those here for you to think about for a little while and remember the old saying ‘Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

Have a great weekend everyone.

What can we do about the shambles that is VET?

Well VET is in the news again, more private providers deregistered or gone into administration, TAFEs failing to meet compliance standards, not assessing students properly and generally behaving badly, and everyone yelling at each other and trying to pass the blame.  It really is, well to put it mildly, more than a bit of a shambles.

Now I know that the vast majority of people in this sector, at all levels, whether they are trainers and assessors, administrative people, or management, and across all parts of the sector, private, public, not for profit, community and enterprise, are committed to doing the right thing and to assisting whoever they work with to achieve the best possible outcomes they can from their study.  I know this.  I know this because I have worked in and with the sector for years.  However, when someone from outside looks in or picks up the paper, or thinks about Vocational education as an appropriate choice, what do they see?  They see a shambles, a mess, and not just a small mess, a mess that has been going on for years now.  Infighting, bickering, passing of blame, atrocious business practices, appalling customer (student) service.  In short they see something like a cow that is stuck in the mud which would probably be better off put out of is misery before it sinks any further. And there is the trouble, we can talk about all the great things the sector does, all the wonderful people in it, how it creates opportunity and outcomes, and is an enormous benefit to Australia.  But, if the sector looks like it should be taken down to the abattoir and turned into pet food, then we my friends have a very serious problem on our hands.

So what can be done to fix this?  What does everyone involved in VET in this country need to do to turn all of this around?  let’s be really frank here, we need to turn it around, because we are being left behind and our reputation for being one of the best if not the best vocational education countries in the world is definitely starting to fray.  Just the economic impact of international students not coming here to study because our VET education system looks like a garbage dump is enormous.

The first thing that needs to happen, is we need a common voice.  All of this bickering, infighting and blaming everyone else has to stop.  I know that TDA, ACPET, ERTO, AEU and every other interest group out there is trying to support their membership, but sometimes it doesn’t help!  Sometimes your agenda is harmful to the sector and just makes everything worse.  If this means that some TAFEs have to be closed or suspended from delivering courses, because they broke the rules and did a really crap job then so be it.  Stop defending them and blaming others.  If private providers don’t meet the standards or behave unconscionably, then don’t defend them, throw them out and advocate for their suspension or closure.  Stop defending these appalling behaviors.

Then, come together and present a single unified vision for the sector, put your agendas away for a little while and come up with a single plan.  Here’s the deal to, if some interest group, or peak organisation or union doesn’t want to play, then so be it, address it, say that they wouldn’t come to the party, couldn’t let go of their agenda, and don’t want to be part of the vision, and then present a cohesive plan for how VET should be run in this country and just ignore them.

If you are a provider you need to do the same thing. Stop just thinking about yourselves, stop looking at just the bottom line, stop thinking about how quickly you can pay off your Porsche, stop thinking about your next expansion and how you can slip in via the side door and get on the good side of the government, or increase your influence by pandering to a particular party line.  Its rubbish and you are stuffing it up for everyone else.  Start realising that this isn’t about you, it’s not about you scaling the bureaucratic ladder until you get to dizzying and rarefied heights, or creating a small fortune you can shift offshore.  It’s about the students and the industries that rely on you providing qualified, competent students, that they can employ.  In addition, stop defending other providers who have done the wrong thing, or better yet, tell someone when they are breaking the rules, you know stand up for the sector you are supposed to be invested in, rather than just yourself.

The same goes for trainers and assessors, and admin people.  I know that you are the guys who usually get shafted.  You are the people who have to put up with everything that flows from the top down and often for so many reasons, you don’t get any say, or choice, or have the ability to say anything without repercussions, or to just walk away and go somewhere else.  Here’s the thing though, if you don’t do something, or even try to do something, you like everyone else in the sector is complicit in this behavior.

Some of you might have noticed that I didn’t mention the government here at all.  Didn’t make any suggestions about what they could do?  That’s because they don’t have to do anything really.  Regardless of what side of the political landscape they are on, they just need to essentially do what they are told.  They need to support the sector in the way it needs to be supported.  They need to stop listening to one interest group over the other, or relying on academics or bureaucrats, who have never worked in the sector a day in their life to inform them.  This however can only happen if the sector comes together and presents them with a single unified vision and plan to drive VET forward and make it work.  If we can’t do that then governments are always going to play one off against the other, and pander to the side that is going to get them more votes or raise their profile.  That is what governments and ministers do.

The real issue here of course is if you don’t do something about this yourselves, then someone else is going to.  Someone else is going to come up with a grand idea of how to reform the sector and get in the governments ear and then you are stuck with whatever you get and its your own fault.

Anyway, that’s just my opinion.

 

Does Public VET mean Quality VET?

Before I start I need to make something clear, I think that a well supported public VET provider is, for the most part, a vital part of the VET landscape in this country.  There is work and projects which are done by the public provider which are either not done by non-public providers or only done by a small number of non-public providers, usually from the not for profit sector.  This piece should also not be taken to be criticism or bagging of the public provider sector, but rather a look at what seems to be a view being pushed by a range of particularly media commentators that the Public provision of VET through TAFE automatically means quality.

Firstly then a couple of facts.  The vast majority of private, again I prefer the term non-public providers, deliver high quality outcomes for their students and employers.  We can see this from NCVER data, and a range of reports from the various state and federal governments.  We can also see this from the small number of non-public providers who have closed or been closed as a result of the fall out from the VET FEE Help issues.  As I have always maintained there were about ten or so providers who were not playing the game as it should have been played so to speak.  10 out of around 4000 or about 0.25% of all providers.  Enough defending the value of non-public providers however’ what is a far more interesting phenomenon I think is the calls from various commentators, that governments should be cordoning off more funding for public providers, because, and this seems to be a common theme, public providers provider quality training.

It is important to note here that I do believe that for the most part public providers (TAFE) do provide quality training outcomes to their students and employers, however as with non-public providers I simply do not think that we can automatically assume that public means quality in all cases and in all courses.  We certainly cannot assume that public means better than non-public in all cases and in all courses.  There are numerous examples across widely varying industries of non-public providers delivering training of at least the same, if not better quality than that which is delivered by TAFE.  Just as there are examples in the opposite direction as well.  TAFE does some things very well. Non-public providers do somethings very well, and across the board there are things are probably not done as well as they could be.

Of course the point of this view is to push the agenda that because TAFE equals  quality that TAFE should get the lions share of government funding.  The interesting thing is that it already does.  The vast majority of government funding and training monies go directly to TAFE, in fact in most states the split between public and non-public when it comes to funding is about 80/20.  So somewhere in the vicinity of 20-25% of government funding goes to non-public providers, while 75-80% goes to TAFE.

So if TAFE already gets the vast majority of government funds allocated to training already,  and if across the board it really doesn’t seem to matter where a person goes to get your training done, as they are probably going to get a quality experience, which meets their needs and provides them with the outcome that they desire regardless of the choice them make, where, oh where is this view coming from.  Part of it is certainly ideological and interestingly I have no real problem with groups, particularly political parties, taking their ideological stances, I just want them to be honest about it.  I don’t care whether you are a politician, part of the education unions, an academic or a researcher, or anyone else for that matter, if you are making a stance on ideological grounds then at least be willing to tell us that.

What this sector needs going forward is not infighting between the various parties, interest groups, providers, media and others, who are whether consciously or not, promoting a particular ideology or agenda.  We need facts and informed discussions.  We need everyone to sit down, put their baggage, their ideologies, to one side, and listen to what other people are saying.  Listen, then openly talk and enter into meaningful discussions about what is best for this sector and the vital part that it plays in the future of this country.

Doom and Gloom or an opportunity to Bloom – VET student loans scheme

So they say a week is a long time in politics and this last week has been a cracker for so many reasons.  The only one I am going to talk about today though is the Vet Student loan scheme which Minister Birmingham announced last week.  Today we saw the release of the eligible courses list for the new program with around 350 programs making the initial list, though there is room for submissions for the inclusion of other programs to be made and these close on 23 October.  Enough about that for the time being, I will come back to the list a little bit later.

There has been a lot of criticism, some of which I think has justification, some of which I don’t think does.  What there has been is a lot of doom and gloom and a lot of talk about the government ruining people’s businesses.  We even saw AIPE go into voluntary liquidation on Friday.  What cam to my mind when I was listening to all of the discussions, most of which will continue I think for at least some time yet, was how it all linked to some of the things I have often talked about in terms of business models and the business of vocational education.  I have heard an number of people talk about the fact that their businesses will be destroyed as a result of these changes or at the very least they will have to downsize their businesses substantially.  Before I go on it is really important to say that I feel for these people.  These people have for the most part done the right thing, obeyed the rules and built businesses which provided high quality educational outcomes to their students and the industries they were involved with and at least in some cases the investments they have made in these businesses over the years will be seriously devalued.   What this drives home to me is the important of distributed revenue streams in your business.  Providers who rely to heavily on one source of revenue, particularly when that revenue stream is controlled by the government in some way are always going to be faced with these challenges.  The same can be said of providers who rely entirely on fee for service markets, when the market wobbles, particularly if they are involved in niche areas, so do they.  All of those who are in the business of vocational education, even public providers need to have diversified models of revenue generation in order for them to weather changes to funding models and changes to the market in general.  It may be okay to make hay while the sun shines, but you always need to remember that some days its rains.

There has also been criticism of the tiered or banded system for student loans, with the levels being $5000, $10,000 and $15,000 depending on the type of qualification, although when we look at the draft list which has been released we see that everything but business and commerce it appears will be in the $10,000 band or above.  The criticisms leveled have again be around how providers can deliver the course for the value of the loan the government has put on it.  Now to be fair the government has said that the loan cap is just that a cap on the amount of money they will loan a student to pay for a course.  They have said that providers can charge whatever they want to, but then the student will have to meet the difference between the two figures.  It is also fair to say that there is an argument about access and equity which can more than reasonably be made about having significant differences between the cap and providers fee, the ability of potential students to meet that gap and questions of equity which arise around that.  This is however an argument for another place, suffice it to say here that large difference between the loan cap and the provider fee will make it difficult for those in the most vulnerable and lower socio-economic groups to be able to afford to enter training through this scheme without additional assistance, where providers choose to charge fees higher than the loan cap.  There are of course also counter arguments about appropriateness of qualifications, state entitlement funding and employment outcomes.  Again however a range of these criticisms are tied to the kinds of business models which were encouraged under the old VET FEE Help system.  I know of a number of providers who despite having extensive Certificate I-IV scopes only ever advertised the high revenue VFH courses on their websites and through other media.  They also did not seek to build their entitlement funding or fee for service businesses because there were substantial sums of money being generated through their VFH business operations.  The funding drove the business models, a little bit like the tail wagging the dog so to speak.  One of the reasons why some providers will find it difficult to deliver under this new scheme is that their model of delivery, and student acquisition is one that relied on the continuation of VFH fees at particular levels.

I have often suggested that most, (and it is really important that this is taken for what it is, a generalisation which also acknowledges that there are outlier courses which cost substantially more to deliver), that most diploma level courses can be delivered in such a way as to produce high quality student outcomes and competency for $10,000 or less.  Why do I say this; because less than 5 years ago they were and there was very little if anything wrong with the graduates being produced.  Over 5 years we saw prices of some Diploma level qualifications rise by 300-400% and business models develop which required these increases to be cost-effective.  It is vitally important to note that most of these business model were not flawed or did not seek to rort the system or rip of the government or students.  Their only issue was that they relied so heavily on both VFH and particular levels of funding.  The ability to set fees where ever providers wanted allowed and even promoted providers adopting business models that only worked under a certain set of circumstances.  Are there models which will work under the new scheme?  Certainly there are and I think the suggestion that it will drive all providers to deliver one to many elearning with little or no support are false.  There are solid face to face models which not only can clearly operate under this new model but can also be profitable.

let’s go back to the list then shall we.  As I said earlier the vast majority of programs are at the $10,000 or $15,000 dollar level with it appears only management and commerce at the lower $5,000 level. A lot has been made about the government ‘picking winners’ so to speak and the inequity between someone who wants to study a vocational education course over a Higher Ed course and while there is weight to this argument there is also weight I think to the argument that where the money is being provided by the government, even if that is through an income contingent loan of some description, there needs be a return on that investment in terms of workforce outcomes.  Is, by creating a list, the government saying one course is better than another, no I don’t think this is the case.  I think the government is legitimately saying, one course seems to have better workforce participation outcomes than another and because of that we are going to provide funding for students who want to undertake this course.  The interesting question that arises from this of course is whether it is fair to apply a test like this to VET and not to HE, but again that is a debate for another time.

So why did I call this post Doom and Gloom or an opportunity to Bloom, mainly because I think as with all change this one presents us as providers with a choice.  We can either spend the next few months worrying, complaining and trying to get the government to change it mind, which it may do on small things, but I doubt it will on anything major, or we can look on this as an opportunity to re-energise what we do, consider our business models, look at ways of not just working, but thriving in this new environment.  I will let you guess what I intend to do.

Anyway as always that’s just my opinion.

Massive changes to VET FEE Help – The King is dead, long live the king

While right at this point there has not been a complete outline of what is going to happen it is fair to say that the days of VET FEE Help are over.  The deeply flawed system which most of us have been critical of almost since its inception will be scrapped at the end of the year and replaced with a completely new system for 2017.  If you want to look at what is currently being reported about the changes you can see articles here and here.

What do we know at the moment?  Well it seems from looking through the information that I have a lot of the suggestions that myself and other have made and that I have talked about at length in previous articles (Redesigning VET and reinventing VFH) have made the cut shall we say.  Lets then look at the major changes we know about.

Everyone will have to reapply and there will be tighter conditions for entry

This had to be part of any package of reforms as far as I was concerned.  No package where currently contracted providers were simply rolled over into a new system was ever going to have legs. The old application system and criteria were systemically flawed and concentrated on the wrong metrics entirely when both determining if someone could be a provider and then managing that provider.  Making everyone reapply will almost instantly contract the number of providers because a number of current providers will simply self select out for various reasons and I am certain that the government will not accept contracts with a number of providers who may look at applying.  The idea that Relationships with industry, student completion rates, employment outcomes and a track record in education will all be assessed when deciding which colleges can access the loans program is a breath of fresh air and should have been included in the first place.

A ban on the usage of brokers and cold calling by providers

This is something that had to happen as well, not just because of what brokers have done to the system, but because cold calling random people and hard selling them a $20,000 diploma has nothing to do with educational outcomes and everything to do with making as much money as possible in the shortest period of time.  It has been my opinion for a long time now that the rise of brokerages, and providers willing to use their services, no questions asked shall we say, was the single most significant factor in the issues which arose from VFH.

A three-tiered system of loan limits will be introduced, with loans capped at $5000, $10,000 and $15,000 depending on the cost of teaching the course.

Again this is in my opinion a no-brainer.  I am yet to be convinced and a lot of people have tried, that a diploma of management is worth $10,000 plus. I think a tiered system rather than a flat cap acknowledges that different types of courses require different investments and have different costs associated with their delivery.  What this will do is reign in the costs associated with programs and bring them back to some sort of normalcy, something they haven’t had in a number of years.  Remember in some cases we saw 300-400% rises in course fees over essentially a 5 year period, with, in the vast majority of cases, no changes to costs or content, well except for having to pay a broker 25%.   UPDATE – Loan caps only apply to the amount of money which a student will be provided with by the government to ‘pay’ for their course.  Providers may charge whatever they wish for the course in question and students will be required to pay any difference between loan cap amount and course cost themselves.

Only students enrolled in courses aligned with industry needs and likely to lead to a job will be eligible for the loans.

I have said it before and I will say it again I am sure, vocational education is about employment outcomes and workforce participation and my mind has boggled at some of the courses which I have seen offered by certain providers.  I acknowledge that there are concerns around priority lists and the like, but if we are being honest here just how many personal trainers and counselors do we need to have.  This in conjunction with the tiered payments model should at least, if properly applied mean a much stronger employment outcomes for money invested in income contingent loans.

The new scheme will include tighter conditions so colleges can be paid in arrears and poor performing institutions can be suspended and have their payments cancelled.

All providers will be paid monthly in arrears based on authorised and verified student data. This is something which should have been part of the system from the word go.  Large upfront commencement payments drove the other activities which broke the system.  If there had not been such substantial almost unregulated upfront revenue a lot of the issues which occurred simply would not have happened.

The Fallout

Massive contraction at the Mega end of the market. Those providers with large exposure in their revenue streams to VFH, particularly those carrying a high level of debt which requires servicing are going to be in serious trouble as will any provider who has been used to charging $10,000 plus for a Diploma of Business, whether they are small or large.  Any provider which doesn’t have a diversified business revenue model will struggle to find their feet again and we will I think see a not insubstantial number fold or contract heavily.  If I was a provider who relied on VFH for a substantial part of my revenue, particularly if my dealings with ASQA or the Department had been anything less than favorable, I think I might be a little worried right now.

But anyway that’s just my opinion.

Let’s start being positive about VET

As some of you know I have been out of commission for a couple of weeks due to an injury to my hand, and during this little break from writing, I have spent a lot of time reading commentary, writings and discussions about the sector.  Something has struck me from all of this reading and it is something that really concerns me.  It seems that a lot of the commentators, industry leaders, thinkers and just people in the sector generally are spending a lot of time complaining and focusing on the negative issues which seem to be surrounding us.  Why does this concern me? Well mainly because we know that what it is we focus on and think about is what we see and what we get.  So if we continually talk about what is wrong about this sector, what needs to be fixed, and what all of the problems are, that is what we are going to see, that is going to inform our viewpoint of the sector and more importantly it is going to infect the viewpoint of others about our sector. Don’t get me wrong here, I like everyone am guilty of being critical of the sector and sometimes we do need to verbalise criticism, but too often I think this critical view takes over, so I want to try to change that a little today and see if we can’t just be positive about the sector for a while.

First off I am really proud of the sector that I work in.  I feel privileged to work in the VET sector, this is a sector that changes lives.  I was at a conference recently where a lot of people (and a lot a highly placed people) shared stories about how this sector had changed peoples lives.  Like the (youngish) grandfather who had improved his reading so much while undertaking a VET course that he was now able to read stories to his granddaughter and the massive change in the way he felt about himself that this seemingly small thing had created.  The kids from generationally  unemployed families, in deeply impoverished areas, getting apprenticeships and breaking out of the cycles that had been their lives.  People with Mental illness getting qualifications and training to help them to be able to work with others with mental illness to help those people on their own roads to recovery.

What we do in the VET sector is important!

We don’t just issue pieces of paper to people, or fill their heads with knowledge, or teach them how to perform tasks.  All of that stuff is well kind of the boring stuff of the sector, the nuts and bolts that sit underneath what it is that we really do.  We offer people the opportunity to change their lives, to have the opportunity to do things they are passionate about, to look at the world differently and explore the opportunities that are there.

VET changes lives!

I am so grateful that I have been able to work in the learning sector, be it VET or organisational learning, or professional and personal development for so many years, because it fuels that passion and that idea that what we do is important and let’s be clear it is not just important to the people we teach.  The importance of what we do if is wider than that.  We have seen recently several reports about the return on investment created by the sector, the value of international education, and the range of other important things that this sector does for the country as a whole.

So I have a little challenge for you all, Whether you are from the public sector (TAFE), a private provider, a not for profit or and enterprise RTO, let’s even if only for a little while try to focus on the great things this sector does, let’s talk about and share the good stories, the life changing moments, the things that really matter, because if we do that then we will improve the sector and the image of the sector far more than we ever could by focusing on the negatives.

 

Anyway, that’s just my opinion.

Labor want a review into the VET sector in Australia

So the big news around the place this morning is the announcement from the Federal Labor Party that if it wins office in the next election it will launch a major review into the Vocational Education and Training sector in Australia.   A full review of the sector is certainly well over due, particularly as we have seen the amount of funding provided to the sector decline over the past few years and certainly not keep up with the schools or university sector.  However, it needs to be an actual proper review.  A review that puts aside our entrenched bias, ideological and political agendas and simply focuses on one key question, what do we need to do in order to ensure that the VET sector in this country is able to provide value for Australia for many years to come?  Now the rhetoric in the announcement about evidence based approaches to policy making and the terms of reference for the review which can be found in the Shadow Ministers press release seem promising at least in terms of an impartial review , but will we really get that?  We have seen both Labor and Green politicians jump on the ‘Stop TAFE cuts’ bandwagon, which is being heavily pushed by the Education unions with both parties already in various forums suggesting that the answer to problems in the sector is to simply pour more money into TAFE.  So I would call on both Bill Shorten and Sharon Bird to emphatically promise us that any review into the  VET sector is actually an impartial one.  One that is prepared to BBQ sacred cows if that is what turns out to be necessary.

So how can this kind of impartial review be undertaken in a way which will convince the sector that it is transparent and not simply a justification of pre-existing ideologies.  Firstly there needs to be representation from all of the parts of the sector public and non-public. The terms of reference need to not preference any particular part of type of provision, which they currently seem to.   There needs to be a chair or whoever is tasked with leading the review who is truly impartial.  The person needs to be someone who the sector can trust is not driven by ideological commitments, someone who does not have commitments to either the public or non-public parts of the sector.  An academic perhaps, I think would be suggestion a number of people could make, however again I would caution this choice as  as we have seen from a lot of the writings of the academics in the sector at the moment there seems to be, at least to my mind,  a bias towards public providers and I a not insubstantial amount of cases connections to either the education unions or the public VET sector.   I actually think that in order for this to be a fair, impartial review that whoever leads it needs to be from outside the sector, preferably with few, if any actual links to it.

Any kind of advisory panel associated with the review also has to be well-balanced and consist of both those from industry and the provider side of the picture,  BUT  please not just the big players.  I for one am sick and tired of seeing advisory panels in this sector stacked with managing directors or the like of very large providers, massive industry groups and worse union leaders or worse academics who have no idea of how the sector works as they have never actually worked in it.  Given that when we take the big players both public and private out of the picture the average provider has less that 750 students there is a massive disconnect if the only people who advise the government are the large providers. And the same goes for industry groups, there needs to be representation from those people at the coal face of employing graduates from the sector and to be honest I have really understood why the unions actually need to be at the table at all in these discussion but that may just be me.  Too often these kinds of reviews become rarefied academic affairs rather than something which produces an actual tangible and usable model for the future.

If Labor, or any other party is going to do this then they need to do it properly, they need to put aside their politics, ideology and sacred cows and undertake a review that looks impartially and transparently at what this sector needs going forward and if it doesn’t produce recommendations which match to what they would have desired they need to suck it up and actually do what is good for the country and sector.

 

Anyway that’s just my opinion.

Total VET Reporting – Lets talk about the figures.

So as some of you may have noticed I have had a little break from my usual posting schedule, mainly due to spending most of the last 2 weeks working with an organisation to delivery some initial TAE training to a large group of their staff.  Of course while I was having a break we saw the release of the Total VET students and courses data 2014 and a number of other documents which relate to it including Equity groups in TVA 2014, both of which I found to be very enlightening reads.  There have already been a couple of responses to the data, most notably Rod Camm’s which to me was quite reasonable, but I thought that I might look at some of the things which jumped out at me.

The first thing that really did leap out at me as I started to look through the data was, what part of this data related to VET FEE Help and what related to everything else and then I saw in explanatory note 30 – ‘It is not possible to identify VET FEE-HELP assisted activity by funding.’  Now I have to admit that this let me down a little when I read, because one of the things I was really interested in looking at in the data was the relationship between VFH and other kinds of funding, but as we can’t currently identify it there is not much that can be done.

So what are some of the figures which I found really interesting; firstly it was the break down of the actual number of students,  3,908,000 students enrolled in training with 4601 Australian providers, or 849 students per provider on average.  Let’s look closer at this however, as a lot has been made of the break up of figures between public and non-public providers and the effect that non public providers are having on TAFE admissions, with non-public providers servicing 57% of students.  What is not often considered, when we hear people talk about this is the massive disparity in the number of public vs non-public providers.  There are 57 TAFE institutes training 1,065,600 students and 2865 non-public providers training 2,252,900 students or 18,700 students per TAFE vs 786 students per non-public provider.  These numbers bear thinking about, at least to my mind, whenever public providers suggest that they don’t have enough students to make ends meet.  Even at a figure of say $2,000 per student, in terms of revenue that is over $35,000,000 on average for a TAFE as opposed to $1,500,000 on average for a private provider.  Now I know that I am talking in averages here and that there are big, small and medium players in both parts of the sector, but I still think it is interesting to consider.

The majority of students were male over the age of 25, which I personally found interesting because our student demographics are more slewed towards female participants. This has a lot to do with the fact that the vast majority of the training we deliver is in community services, where around 85% of the workforce is female.

What about the programs these students are undertaking, 30% of all enrollments were in Certificate III level programs and 86% of all programs completed were at a Certificate I-IV level.  This I think says something very important about the system that we have and that at its heart it is focusing on the right thing, that is, those programs that really are going to make a difference to people’s employment outcomes and their workforce participation options.  Business and commerce was the area in which most people studied, followed closely by community services.  While it has been suggested that the amount of business and commerce training being undertaken relates tightly to the VFH, its marketing and the perceived ease of deliver of these courses, and while we can’t see what amounts of these courses were funded using VFH or at least not from these figures, general business skills are deeply embedded in most of the things that people do so having a high percentage of people here may simply portray the market.  This could also be said of community sector qualifications, which are the second most popular.  The community sector is one of the largest employment areas and one in which the need for workers continues to grows.  It could be suggested that if areas like these were not high on the list that this may well be far more concerning than the current situation.

Another of the figures which I found quite interesting was in the equity group data.  By far the two largest equity group accessing VET were students from a non-English speaking background and students from rural and remote areas, with their participation rates being much higher than indigenous students or students with a disability.  Again within these groups we see that the overwhelming majority of students as with the general student population are undertaking certificate I-IV level programs, which as I said above is I think a good indicator that the heart of the system is targeted properly.  As we would also expect in a system where the vast majority of training delivered is around entry-level job roles, government funding made up around 60% of the way in which people ‘paid’ for their training with fee for service making up the rest.

So are there any disturbing pieces of data in this report.  In my honest opinion, when we consider that this is the first time this data has been collected and we don’t have a lot of previous data to base assumptions on, I don’t think there is.  I think the big thing is that this data needs to be improved and perhaps integrated with the data collected around VFH and other programs and then sliced and diced to give us a better picture of what is happening as will also happen as we accumulate data sets over a number of years and can begin to make comparisons.

Anyway that’s my opinion.

An enormous thank you to everyone

I just wanted to say an enormous thank you to all of you my readers, both directly via the blog and those who contribute to the conversations on LinkedIn and Twitter.

When I started this blog a number of years ago,  back in 2011 as a bit of a thinking and conversation place for myself mostly around organisational learning, there was no way I ever thought that it would grow into what it is today, one of the most read blogs on Vocational Education and Training in Australia, with such an outstanding group of people who offer their own insights and commentary on the subjects and topics I talk about.  I have gained so much both personally and professionally from little project.

I am deeply humbled when I look at the number of people who visit this blog every day and the number of those people who choose to comment and interact either here on the blog itself or on LinkedIn or Twitter.

I like so many others of you believe deeply in the importance of the Vocational Education and Training sector to Australia’s future and ongoing prosperity.  It is easy at the moment to get caught in the darkness and the negativity and to fail to see the amazing work that so many people and organisations both public and non-public do in this sector to really help people, to change their lives. Everyday I hear stories of how VET has changed people’s lives and taken them to places they never imagined that could go and it makes me proud to part of it.

And while I am saddened by the activities of such a small proportion of sector, who put their own wealth over the outcomes that are possible for so many people who utilise vocational education. I am deeply proud to be associated with and be friends with so many outstanding people whose sole  goal is to provide Australians with the best possible educational outcomes.  I feel an enormous sense of privilege to not only know you all to one extent or another, to have so many of you read my sometimes a little ranty musings, but just to be able to work in this sector .  A number of years ago at the Australian Training Awards I was asked what it was that had kept me involved in Learning and Development and the VET sector for so many years.  My answer was simple, because when I wake up and go to work, I know in my hear of hearts that we are doing something good, something worthwhile, and something that changes people’s lives.

I still believe that and feel that way today, what we do matters, it changes lives, it creates futures for people and hopefully makes us better people in the process as well.

So to all the friends I have made along this journey, my readers, be they regular or one-off, all of the people who comment and offer their views, the people I agree with and those who challenge and argue with me.  Thank you and I look forward to us all continuing this journey for a long time to come.

A Federal system for Vocational Education?

I for one have been for a long time now a proponent of the Federal government being in charge of Vocation Education in Australia, so as you might expect I have reacted quite well to the news recently that there seems to be once again support for this notion both Federally and by the States.  As I said I have for a long time thought that a set up where the federal government is in charge of the regulation and funding of a national system of vocational education makes sense.  It should make it easier to navigate the morass of funding that currently exists and changes whenever you attempt to work across state boarders whether from an RTO perspective or from an organisational perspective.  Having a single set of rules and criteria would certainly make a difference.

One of the significant things I think having a Federal system would do is to change the States from being on both the provider and funder sides of the equation.  Currently all of the states fund VET in their state, however they also provide vocational education through their network of TAFE institutes.  Moving all of the funding for the delivery of training to the Federal government would have the effect of TAFE becoming another provider in the market, simply a provider which is owned by the State government and the state government could then determine from its overall budget what amounts it wanted to allocate to the resourcing and infrastructure of their TAFEs.  It would see a transparency around what money being given to TAFE from the State government was actually being used for.  Now that is not to suggest that a federal system might not earmark a certain amount of money for delivery by public providers, but what it would do is clear up the sometimes muddy waters around what is support for delivery and what is support for infrastructure.

The other significant thing it would or should do is as I said at the start even out the currently differences in what is funded and to what level.  As I said a couple of weeks ago I was amazed when I found out that in Victoria every AQF qualification is funded, the amount of money simply varies, which is unlike Queensland and other states where funding is allocated to what is seen to be the needs of that State in terms of skilled workers now and into the future.  Having one set of funding rules across the country would work for everyone, it would make it easier for organisations (particularly those who work across the entire country or a number of states) to access funding for their staff training, which is as anyone who has ever worked in a L&D role in such an organisation will tell you is currently a brain melting nightmare.  It would work well for providers both niche and large.  For example we are one a small number of providers who deliver a particular qualification, currently someone from Queensland can obtain the qualification for around $100 (it is funded in QLD), where as someone from NSW (where it is not funded) would have to pay $3,500 for the same qualification.   The management of funding contracts at a provider level would also be much easier, no longer perhaps having to produce multiple reports for different states with different rules and requirements.  A federal system should have the effect of smoothing out a range of the issues which currently make funded programs across states difficult to manage for everyone.

So what are the downfalls, well there could be some issues where their might be a mismatch between the needs at a national level in terms of skills and the needs at a state level.  On a nation level there could be a shortage of appropriately qualified aged care workers say but WA might have a massive over-supply.  Conversely there could be no national shortage of plumbers but serious shortages in QLD.  Not that these kinds of issues could not be relatively easily addressed, it is just that given that we are such a large country it may be the case that such differences arise.  Although on a side note seeing these differences at a national level rather than at a state level might encourage the federal government to provide incentives for say aged care workers in WA to move to other states or plumbers to move to QLD.

I also don’t think a federal system would affect programs like for example Skilling Queenslanders for work, where the additional money in the program is not going to providers but to community organisations to support the learning activities of their cohorts.  There kinds of programs could still be funded on a state by state basis dependent on need, the funding source for the provider would simply change for the state to the federal government.

It would or should remove this ridiculous situation we currently have where while most of the providers in the country are regulated by ASQA, two states still regulate a portion of RTOs in their state.  All providers both public and non-public would be just that providers for a national system, providers with one set of regulations and one set of rules around funding.  I for one really hope it gets legs and gets over the line.

 

Anyway thats just my opinion.