VET & TAFE
VET student entitlement schemes flawed
In recent months Skills Victoria’s experimentation with market-based VET funding has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Despite attempts by the Victorian government to maintain a positive narrative, stories have emerged in the Victorian Parliament and in the media of disreputable providers, inappropriate training and the misuse of public funds.
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The problem is not student entitlements – as restricted and qualified as they are in Victoria – but making them available at private for profit providers without robust standards or quality control.
Why are higher education students to be trusted with their own futures with student entitlements but not vocational students?
Agree in part in that quality and capacity of regulatory authorities to ensure standards of delivery and assessment are maintained within the constraints of the AQTF is central though flawed. However to assume that this is necessarily a consequence of opening the training market to free enterprise is ignoring the concern industry have expressed for some time that quality has been an issue in the public system well before these reforms were fully implemented. What contestability is achieving is to further undermine confidence in the VET system regardless of provider. Look a little deeper and you will see that the public system have made their contribution to the system’s unravelling. Some of the responses from state government to address distortions that have occurred will curb the opportunism that has occurred recently in some public and private RTOS. Just because they are not reported in the press does not mean there is nothing happening behind the walls of our larger providers.