VET
The TAFE shake up around the nation has led to closures and mergers for some institutions but the sector is strong and will survive, writes Brendan Sheehan
34 | Issue 2 2013
For anyone involved in or with the public TAFE system, the past year has been one of deepening gloom.
In April, Australia’ s state and territory governments signed up to a Commonwealth plan to create a market(“ marketisation”) in the vocational education and training sector by extending greater access to public funding by private registered training organisations( RTOs).
The theory goes that this added element of competition would provide greater choice for“ consumers”( i. e. students and trainees) and a system more responsive to actual training needs. Fair enough.
In abstract terms, it doesn’ t matter what institution is being subsidised by government to deliver a qualification – public or private, TAFE or university, where it’ s headquartered – so long as it represents value in terms of both cost and quality.
But in practice, marketisation has proved somewhat more problematic. Reform of public funding arrangements for any activity or public good is almost always going to be a challenging process, attended as it usually is by“ winners” and“ losers”. TAFE people were largely hostile to the whole proposition of so-called“ skills reform” on the understanding that increased competition would inevitably reduce the relative share of public funding flowing to TAFEs as more RTOs accessed public funding. There was also the experience with skills reform in Victoria to concentrate minds and to fuel both antipathy and apprehension.
Victoria embarked on the path of marketisation in 2008 and had more or less open access to public funding by 2011, resulting in the severe dislocation of the whole Victorian training system.
There was a proliferation of private provision in areas of low economic priority, leading to a spectacular budget blowout of about 50 per cent($ 300 million plus). And it debased the whole Victorian VET qualifications system, with qualifications being delivered in the private sector on the basis of scant actual training(“ tick and flick”), with the result that any VET qualification in Victoria delivered outside the public TAFE system over the past couple of years has to be considered suspect.
It was a Gotterdammerung scenario for TAFEs. The share of government subsidised enrolments by private providers increased from 14 per cent in 2008 to 36 per cent by the end of September 2011 and is now in excess of 50 per cent. The underlying operating results of most TAFEs plunged in the red and several of the regional TAFEs became distinctly wobbly.
Just when you thought it couldn’ t get any worse for TAFE, it got a helluva lot worse( let’ s call it Gotterdammerung plus).
The Victorian Coalition government, which inherited skills reform from its Labor predecessor, decided to staunch its bleeding budget by introducing, in effect, competitive neutrality and placing funding of the public TAFE institutes on