VET & TAFE campusreview. com. au
Scheme needs scrutiny
The VET Student Loans scheme has already begun, but what are the implications for VET providers?
By Mark Warburton
The last decade has been turbulent for the VET sector. Funding arrangements and the regulatory environment have changed constantly, with little time to assess and refine the latest innovation or find out whether it was of benefit to citizens, business or the economy. In some cases, failure was manifest and we watched governments do a 180-degree turn and plummet blindly in the other direction. It is no way to run the country’ s VET sector.
The VET Student Loans scheme started on January 1. Its legislation was rushed through parliament late last year, with few details of the scheme available for anyone to consider. More details became available just three working days prior to the commencement of the scheme when education minister Simon Birmingham made the first VET Student Loans Rules 2016.
The scheme seeks to make access to VET affordable by helping students to pay their tuition fees. In doing so, it contributes to the financial resources of VET providers and the provision and development of VET in Australia.
The new legal framework doesn’ t ensure that any student will have any part of their tuition fees paid for them through the scheme. There is no effective appeal process for any student who may feel aggrieved by not receiving this assistance. Of course, the scheme will be used to pay the tuition fees of many students. But this will occur as a discretionary act of executive government, rather than as an entitlement to assistance with vocational education and training.
The participation of private VET providers and, after seven years, of public VET providers is discretionary and not subject to merits review or consideration by the parliament. The Secretary of the Department of Education and Training has substantial power to control the operations of all VET providers, their approved courses and academic curriculum.
The scheme gives the departmental secretary a very high level of discretion over most aspects of the scheme on the grounds that this will ensure its integrity. We still do not have much detail on what the secretary is going to do with this discretion. When this scheme is implemented, what is the landscape going to look like? I’ m sceptical of visions, but could I have a bit of a picture?
Take for example the current VET provider application process. It is being conducted along the lines of a major tender process with significant probity safeguards and all the hallmarks of an exercise that will determine who wins‘ the business’.
Will the winners be told you can only have loans for this number of students in these specific courses?
Is the scheme going to run in a similar manner to higher education student places before the introduction of demand-driven funding?
I recently released a paper entitled The VET Student Loans Scheme: Is it a good model for a student loan scheme? It examined one component of the scheme: the arrangements for the payment of tuition fees. It gave me a picture of this aspect of the scheme and it wasn’ t pretty. Many individual provisions sounded reasonable, but when they were put together they didn’ t seem to form a coherent scheme.
It was a difficult job. The department has told journalists that many of my assertions are not correct. I hope that is the case. It would help if there was more explanatory material publicly available.
The department hasn’ t had the time to develop the required information materials, administrative processes and IT systems in consultation with VET
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