Recent history provides the ingredients for a racy tale about a sector with a tragic flaw. There is not much point in dwelling on past events for their own sake. My first qualification was an honours degree in history, and ...

New South Wales skills minister John Barilaro has told a conference that declining VET enrolments and the sector’s so-called ‘middle child’ status in education is “the price of, for decades, telling young kids to go to university”. Barilaro, speaking yesterday at ...

VET is crucial for a skilled national workforce, but it was largely ignored in the federal election campaign; a proper review can change that. Despite the crisis in the sector, VET didn’t gain much traction as an election issue in ...

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s new Cabinet has been broadly met with praise from the education industry, though the shuffling of the Vocational Education and Training portfolio, from Scott Ryan to Karen Andrews, has chagrined some corners of the VET sector. ...

Australia’s competitiveness in the future international marketplace and ability to cope with digital disruption will depend largely on the VET sector delivering STEM training to the workforce, a new report has argued. The report, The VET Era: Equipping Australia’s workforce for ...

A national report on the effectiveness of reform politely reveals numerous policy failings. As a consultant in VET for the last 24 years, engaged by many government clients, I have often seen examples of game-playing by those clients. For instance, ...

Federal Labor has announced an election plan that would create a new tier of higher education – one that looks strikingly similar to the college system universities absorbed 25 years ago. Shadow minister for higher education Kim Carr has announced that Labor ...

If federal public policymakers lack the knowledge and in-house experience related to VET, how can they address its problems? If you have spent the last 40 years in the vocational education sector, like I have, you will be used to ...

A new report shows that to simply maintain current participation rates in higher education and VET, both sectors will need rapid enrollment growth throughout the coming years. Participation rates, in this context, refers to the proportion of people who are either ...

The federal government lays VET FEE-HELP’s failure at Labor’s feet, conveniently ignoring its own policy shortcomings since 2013. What does a government do when the whole country knows its policy has failed? In the case of the current federal government ...