TAFEs are unfairly criticised for being out-of-touch

Chief executive TAFE Directors Australia Craig Robertson.

Consensus is the new way forward for certain public policy, it seems. While business, unions and government will come together to start the industrial relations journey, the template for vocational education seems to be largely set.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is attracted to the national hospital agreement as the template for vocational education and training (VET). This would see “national efficient pricing” and “activity-based funding” as models for VET.

It’s a good starting point but it has its limits.

We have seen first-hand in recent months the benefits of strong public hospitals. Resources were able to be turned to the COVID crisis. Rapid investments were made safe in the knowledge that resources could be diverted to other health services once the crisis eased.

TAFEs are the public hospitals of vocational education. Australia has experimented far too long with the folly that free markets do an efficient job in allocating government resources for skills and training. Too much public administration is tied up in defining training requirements and assuring that money is well spent because of a deep distrust in the ability of markets to deliver. The Morrison government is still cleaning up the VET FEE-HELP mess, unleashed through a blind faith in the idea of quality arising from the competitive forces of the VET market.

Nobody criticises governments for chasing efficiencies. Activity-based funding is the tool that is used for the public hospital system. Governments choose to aggregate health services in hospitals as the best model to address health needs. They don’t rely on the market to do the best for patients.

While neither the Prime Minister nor the Productivity Commission would have such major segmentation of the VET sector in mind, a commitment to pricing is welcome. Pricing relies on knowledge of real costs, and anything that shines a light on the costs of quality in VET is a good thing.

Importantly, the case-mix tool which underpins the health agreement is an administrative tool, not a planning tool. The patient presenting with a heart attack is not offered an appendectomy because that’s what the hospital agreement dictates. Comorbidities are not reduced to a single intervention. Case-mix facilitates holistic treatment for the patient, in the hands of the professionals on site.

TAFEs are unfairly criticised for being out-of-date or out-of-touch with the latest technologies or with what employers need. Many of the critics might be surprised to learn that most VET delivery in TAFEs is determined by elaborate industry structures and processes, managed by the Commonwealth. To achieve national consistency, industry determines a “basket of skills” it deems employers need. Regulation and funding controls reinforce training delivery, regardless of the real need at the local level.

The complexity of the system that the Prime Minister highlighted last week derives from this very process. The average 18 months it takes to develop or update a training package — two years for at least a third of packages — is not the fault of the agents tasked with the job. It takes time to consult and reach national agreement from the many industry voices engaged in the process.

For too long we have accepted that centrally determined competencies for a job reflect the real world of work. Vocational qualifications have become overly specific about the training for an occupation, based on the falsehood that the tasks that make up the job are consistent across the country. The task specification in training packages too easily reduces vocational education to rote learning, which hardly prepares students for the complex interplays in work which call on problem solving and creativity.

One of the real shortcomings is the failure to recognise that vocational education must build core, transferable skills. Most Australians would take for granted that skills for life — let alone work — must comprise literacy, numeracy and now digital literacy, and should be core components of vocational education. They are often implied in the basket of skills specified by industry but it can be pot luck whether a student presenting with these needs will be supported by the training provider or funded by the government.

Skills for industry are important to prepare people for employment and to start businesses. However, the current industry-only approach is not fit-for-purpose, for businesses or students.

If the industrial relations parties must come together to form a new consensus, the same should occur for VET, otherwise the system will continue to be out of touch. TAFEs bring deep industry expertise and vocational education to the table.

Craig Robertson is chief executive of TAFE Directors Australia.