Camm retains his faith in vocational education future

Rod Camm has stepped down as head of the Australian Council of Private Education and Training.

Rod Camm, the departing CEO of the Australian Council for Private Education and Training. Picture: Britta Campion

After four years in the centre of the cyclone that engulfed vocational education, Rod Camm has stepped down as head of the Australian Council of Private Education and Training, the body that represented most of the private colleges that ripped off the now-shuttered VET FEE-HELP student loans scheme.

When Camm took up the role in late 2014, news of the scandal — in which some colleges were recruiting vulnerable and poorly qualified students into courses to get paid fees through the government-run loan scheme — was just breaking.

“I thought: ‘I wonder how big this will get?’ And the rest is history,” says Camm. “It’s probably the biggest educational failure we’ve ever seen.”

At its peak in 2015 nearly $3 billion a year in federal government money was being channelled to colleges through the VET FEE-HELP scheme, all of which was supposed to be paid back by students when they graduated and earned more than a threshold income.

But many students were lured into courses by offers of free laptops, many even unaware they were obligated to repay the loan for their fees. It’s still unclear how much was rorted by dodgy col­leges but it is estimated to be well more than $1 billion.

Compared with ACPET’s membership of more than 1000 colleges, few were engaged in the rorts. But it presented Camm and the group’s board with difficult decisions because the rorters were big companies with large cashflows. The group had to decide how to deal with these members. “Fortunately we chose not to just support the members,” Camm says. “We had to say: ‘This is outrageous.’ We had to have some very frank discussions.

“The history of ACPET is that if you pay a membership fee you’re in. And that just would not cut it any more. We had to start cleansing our own system.”

That was difficult because ACPET ended up in the Supreme Court after trying to discipline some member companies and “the big rorters had the most money, more than us”.

“ACPET had to rebuild its brand. More due diligence, more vetting, pushing people out.

‘‘Every year at renewal we were saying: ‘We’re not going to invite you to renew,’ ” he says. “We’ve been quietly pushing out about 100 a year (for three years). That’s courageous for a board but it needed to be done.”

Camm says membership is building again but with much higher entry tests. There are more stringent codes of conduct and new members need to be vouched for by other members.

He says that private vocational education does have a strong future.

“Students are still satisfied,” he says. “Job outcomes are still good from private providers.”

But Camm says the vocational education sector (including public TAFE colleges) needs to give better information to students about courses and their job outcomes, as the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching does for higher education.

The National Centre for Vocational Education Research (which Camm used to head) has data available, he says, but it can’t publish it because of agreed restrictions. Government needs to say “in the public interest we are going to change that”, he says.