VET & TAFE
Funding in the fishbowl
Vocation’ s recent listing on the Australian Stock Exchange brings a new level of public scrutiny to revenue models for the sector. By John Mitchell
When speakers at conferences decide to abandon their PowerPoint slides and speak unscripted, they often reveal much more about what they really think. That was the case at a national VET conference I attended nearly three years ago, when the person welcoming participants, as the representative of the state government sponsoring the event, decided to stop his formal slide presentation and, as they say, talk from the heart.
What he then said to the audience not only had an impact on me at the time, I’ ve also thought about it many times since. The incident came back to mind recently because of the volume of publicity in recent weeks about the business model for a company newly listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, Vocation, which I will come to later in this article.
The conference presenter’ s PowerPoint slides consisted mostly of graphs indicating the increase in course completions in VET, such as certificates in fitness training, as a result of additional government funding. The speaker was clearly pleased with these results, but after showing a sample of his graphs he decided to stop the slides and share his feelings about the work he and his government colleagues had been undertaking, helping TAFE institutes improve their business models.
Proudly, he recounted how thoroughly he and his colleagues had interrogated the business plans and approaches of Victorian TAFE institutes. Candidly, he shared his surprise that some of the institutes with the highest reputations for business success had, in fact, been found to have less adequate business plans than lower profile institutes. He then said passionately that this project to improve TAFE business planning had been a highlight of his career as a public servant.
At the time, I was sitting in the audience listening intently because I was the next speaker and his comments conflicted with my presentation. I was about to stand up and share the findings from my research in the previous 12 months about the leading edge of customer responsiveness by TAFE institutes, nationally. I had prepared my PowerPoint slide presentation based on the four publications I had written in the previous year, consisting of 10 case studies of TAFE institutes creating and adding value for commercial clients across NSW, 10 case studies of one metropolitan NSW TAFE institute improving the capabilities of its clients’ workforces, seven case studies of a regional SA TAFE using innovative methods to upskill workers across that state and 10 case studies of an outer metropolitan TAFE institute in Perth reinventing itself so that it was client focused and demand driven.
These 37 case studies suddenly seemed at odds with the previous speaker’ s revelations about the poor state of business models in some of the high-profile TAFE institutes he had examined. Generally speaking, business models are frameworks for planning, marketing and managing business operations and they can result in value being added for customers and revenue being returned to an organisation.
So when I stood up to give my presentation, I too abandoned my PowerPoint slides to say that my work as a researcher had shown that, at the leading edge of TAFE practice, institutes were progressively and impressively increasing their business models, for the benefit of their clients. I also acknowledged the outstanding business models of many Victorian institutes over the previous
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