Yesterday was “National TAFE Day” Brendan O’Connor celebrated in the Reps

“The role of TAFE is absolutely vital” the Skills and Training Minister said in Question Time.   “I wish all those teachers and trainers and the workforce of all the campuses across the country a very happy day because they do a great job looking after the many, many students.” But did he not mean training? No Mr O’Connor meant TAFE.  Private providers -it’s going to be a quiet three years, unless its six – or nine.

In Expert Opinion

There was a ton of talk about training at the Jobs and Skills Summit. Claire Field sets out the opportunities and challenges for VET (episode 13 HERE)

and in Features 

The Australian Collaborative Education Network Board on quality outcomes of work integrated learning and why it must involve students. New in Commissioning Editor Sally Kift’s celebrated series, Needed now in learning and teaching

plus Merlin Crossley (UNSW) on why knowing stuff matters and why Google isn’t everything

and Frank Larkins (Uni Melbourne) on the WA public universities 2021 financials – they had a very good year

with Mahsood Shah (Swinburne U) on the message in international student satisfaction survey scores. Institutions must do better.

Before the election the coalition issued a range of IP templates for Higher Education Research Commercialisation which weren’t liked by lobbies.  They’re still around, just not as widely

They had been a while coming but from the start lobbies considered them prescriptive and intrusive (CMM October 19 2021 and March 7).

Last week they appeared again, pretty much unchanged, with the only apparent response to criticism an undertaking using them is voluntary (CMM September 2) and that they only apply to the Trailblazer Universities (now funded) and the Australia’s Economic Accelerator programmes. Good-oh but they will according to the Department of Education (as of August 1), “provide the basis for benchmarking the IP framework applied by universities under those two programmes” – which does not sound all that voluntary to CMM.

But make that one programme. As to using them for the Accelerator, it will only be an issue if it is ever legislated.

Monash U DVC R Rebekha Brown thanks task-groups who worked on university preparations for next year’s Excellence for Research in Australia exercise

That’s the one Education Minister Jason Clare cancelled last week. But not to worry all the effort will be useful, “for the transition to the new ERA exercise,” which Professor Brown thinks will be “a more fit for purpose and streamlined ERA exercise.”

The Australian Bureau of Statistics is considering new “emerging occupations” to add to the ANZ standard classification. Course creators take note

Jobs that are turning up in employment advertisements include

* regulatory affairs specialist in  healthcare, banking and energy

* data scientist  “using advanced algorithms including building and deploying sophisticated machine learning models”

* supply chain/logistics analyst, “may manage route activity including invoicing, electronic billing, and shipment tracing”

* data engineer, “integrates, consolidates and maintains databases by building data pipelines to gather information from different source systems”

The university announces an MOU with Tata Consulting Services, part of the global giant Tata Group (six continents, 700 000 staff)

The opportunities appear endless with research collaboration, plus “hands-on learning in India and Australia, internships, graduate employment and professional development,” all mentioned,

Nor does it appear to be all about the university selling into India.

“One of the most urgent and important challenges today is to scale up education and skilling to support the Australian industry’s digital transformation,” TCS’ Girish Ramachandran says.

It’s a year, almost to the day since Uni SA announced an education partnership, with the Accenture consultancy (CMM September 6 2021), including degrees and short courses.

They make a change from the standard one-way pathways

by CLAIRE FIELD  

The prime minister wants a transformative national skills agreement with the states and territories – that will depend on data

When Terry Moran was the CEO of the Australian National Training Authority, he taught me the importance of data in designing VET reforms and the importance of examining state and territory differences.

Working in ANTA’s data analysis team it was a fairly common occurrence for Terry to ask us for specific data and specific state-territory comparisons before his meetings with state and territory senior officials. He cleverly used the data to highlight good and poor performance in different jurisdictions – and in turn used that to generate consensus on proposed reforms.

That kind of data-driven approach is what will be needed if the Commonwealth is to strike the transformative National Skills Agreement the Prime Minister is seeking.

The Commonwealth must ensure the new agreement recognises the vast differences across states and territories in how they deliver VET, and engages them not just in co-funding the new agreement but on the raft of other reforms the sector is currently trying to finalise.

These include the new governance model for Jobs and Skills Australia, which former National Centre for Vocational Education Research CEO Craig Fowler argues persuasively must involves states and territories rolling out the 180,000 initial Fee-Free TAFE places and a raft of other changes, as well as ensuring quality in the VET system is not compromised as these reforms roll out.

The data the Commonwealth needs is available in two key NCVER publications:

* Government funding of VET (2020), and

* Total VET students and courses (2021)

They show that in 2020 the Commonwealth provided just over one-third of all recurrent VET funding (34 per cent) up from just 26 per cent in 2017.  When you add in the specific purpose payments and the time-limited funding the Commonwealth provides, its contribution rises to 49.7 per cent of all VET funding.

So the relative share of funds states and territories provide has been declining in recent years and yet all the talk around the Summit was on the need for the Commonwealth’s contribution to increase.

The other important data examines which providers students are enrolled with and how states and territories are funding them. There are extraordinary differences at the jurisdictional level (and more details on my website).

 Claire Field is an adviser to the tertiary education sector

Kate Gunn (Uni SA) receives Suicide Prevention Australia’s 2022 LiFE Award.

Laura Smith-Khan (Law, UTS) receives the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ Max Crawford Medal for “achievement and promise in the humanities.”