Govt lifeline for troubled TAFE

AS TAFEs around Victoria feel the squeeze, the government has advanced funds to help one over financial difficulties.

Bendigo City Gardens

THE Victorian government has advanced funds to a TAFE to help it through financial difficulties, as the state's TAFEs come under unprecedented pressure from an open training market on one side and an uncapped higher education system on the other.

Skills Minister Peter Hall told parliament the government had brought forward payments to an unnamed regional institute “to assist it to meet its current financial obligations”.

Mr Hall was responding to suggestions from ALP MP John Lenders that “at least one central Victorian TAFE has experienced severe difficulties”.

Mr Hall told the HES it was “just a matter of timing … to assist them over a hump”.

“This has happened before and I dare say it’ll happen in the future. It wasn’t a handout by any means – it was just bringing forward payments due to them in due course, to assist them with their balance.”

Mr Hall declined to identify the institute. “I don’t want to reflect poorly on it in any way,” he said.

Of the three regional TAFE institutes in central Victoria, Goulburn Ovens TAFE and the University of Ballarat’s TAFE division said they had received no advance payments.

The CEO of Bendigo Regional Institute of TAFE, Maria Simpson, wasn’t available for comment. However, she recently conceded Bendigo had been “struggling with the contestable environment”, while dismissing suggestions that it had received additional funding in order to pay its staff.

“We are completing the process of reviewing course delivery with the intent of being more innovative and ensuring we meet the needs of the market,” Ms Simpson said.

She said Bendigo was “looking at restructuring the business”, but not before Easter.

Numerous reports have emerged in the past year of Victorian TAFEs under financial stress.

TAFEs are losing business in the state’s open training market, with government-funded enrolments stagnating and fee-for-service business declining, according to an as-yet unpublished report.

TAFEs have become the minority provider of government-funded training in the state, with just 48 per cent market share, after government-subsidised training by private colleges skyrocketed 68 per cent in three years.

Of the 18 institutes, 11 experienced declines in government-funded training last year, topped by Bendigo with a 14 per cent decrease in funded hours.

Victorian TAFEs have also lost income as a result of changes to funding and eligibility rules in October and February.

Meanwhile, after the federal government this year removed limits on the number of undergraduate students universities could recruit, TAFEs are also losing potential students to universities.

La Trobe University’s Bendigo campus is growing strongly in the uncapped environment. Offers have risen 33 per cent in three years, raising its undergraduate numbers to around 5000.

Last September the HES reported that the Victorian TAFE sector was “financially destitute”, with only two institutes recording operating surpluses in 2010. However the government has disputed this.