policy & reform
Sector policy in Australia:
Skill shock
There is a serious policy vacuum on skills funding. By Martin Riordan
the rush by Canberra to raid previously sacrosanct university funding, and states leaping to raise TAFE and vocational education fees or withdraw group training funds amid the Gillard government’ s extraordinarily generous Gonski financial offer, highlights the precarious state of the Australian tertiary education sector.
Australian universities, TAFEs and private training providers are each experiencing shock. The shake-out is inevitably to reach industry, students and communities. One immediate issue is a doomsday level of fallout among apprentices.
Look at the political uncertainty. It has produced a spectacular policy vacuum; three federal Tertiary Education and Skills ministers within four months. The swap of out-going Rudd supporter Chris Bowen with trade minister Craig Emerson to the portfolio, and promotion of Sharon Bird as Tertiary Education and Skills minister, has done little to alleviate concerns.
Skills policy remains short-changed with lauded outcomes increasingly showing signs of real risk. Add real concerns about international education, and the picture is complete.
Looking to the federal coalition to date has raised prospects of even greater funding cutbacks, with still no policy releases planned.
For skills policy, the Evans legacy left unresolved a spectacular $ 1.75 billion impasse between the Commonwealth and New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, regarding their share of the reward payments under the National Partnership Agreement on Skills( NPA). This has produced adverse state budgets, significantly impacting on the public provider( TAFE); the sector the NPA was supposed to protect under transition arrangements’.
Prime Minister Gillard rushed to sign the NPA with premiers and first ministers at a COAG meeting in Canberra in April last year. This was despite advice from TAFE and other senior consulting that the equivalent of the higher education base funding review was essential before committing to a National Entitlement to Training, across all jurisdictions.
Within months the NPA stalled, and bickering and state budget changes ultimately deferred the implementation of Entitlement to a phased schedule from 2013-14. Costs of demand-led‘ entitlement’ are now only becoming apparent. In response, states and territories have not only looked at training costs.
Of equal concern is that in parallel to the national review of VET regulation and registration under the National Skills Standards Council, under chair John Dawkins, many jurisdictions have started creating their own quality criterion for funding and new regulation, which may further set-back previous agreements on harmonisation of standards.
At least TAFE directors’ call for governance reform to TAFE has been heeded; a policy response we commend.
The commonwealth’ s own raid on skills funding has continued over four years. This withdrawal of funding and abdication by Canberra of what used to be its National VET Reform COAG agenda has assailed the technical and further education aspirations of employers and students
22 | May 2013