New standards council will help deal with challenges ahead: Dawkins

The success of the economy can be put down to changes made in education and training policy – and new standards council will take it even further, a conference has been told. A new standards council will help create transparency across the vocational education and training sector nationally, the TAFE Directors Australia (TDA) annual conference has been told. John Dawkins, chair of the National Skills Standards Council (NSSC) and the Australian Qualifications Framework Council, told those attending the event in Sydney last week the new system would help the sector deal with challenges. He said the past 20 years had seen great change and while people were tempted to credit the success of the economy to the mining boom, he believed it was due to changes made in education and training policy over the past two decades. These gains needed to be built upon, Dawkins said. The NSSC replaces the National Quality Council, which Dawkins chaired, and which was dissolved in July. The skills standards council will report to commonwealth, state and territory ministers on the development of national standards for vocational education and training, as well as developing and maintained such standards, providing information to sector regulators and to the sector itself. It would also oversee and endorse national training packages. “We find that we have a rather changed landscape for the provision of education and training [than 20 years ago],” Dawkins told the conference. “The higher education providers are fewer and larger, the vocational education and training providers are more numerous and on average much smaller. Twenty years ago VET was TAFE and TAFE was VET, and while TAFE is still a large part of the VET system, it now has thousands of providers participating along with it, and so the regulators … [are] influenced by these factors. “The domestic demand for skilled labour, the composition of that demand, the diversity of providers together with the constant demand from overseas for education and training across the board, to all of this we have to respond while maintaining and hopefully improving the quality of provision.” The framework for the council, which has already had its first meeting, has been established and Dawkins said it would hopefully result in more transparency for students and a better understanding of the sector on the part of employers. It will sit alongside the Higher Education Standards Panel, the equivalent body for the university sector. “[The objectives] are information, accountability and course quality,” he said. “What the NSSC is about is trying to develop the standards that will help us achieve those agreed objectives.”While Victoria and Western Australia have said they will not submit to national regulation in full, Dawkins said the education ministers had agreed to national standards.