private providers; pressure on public TAFEs that have a much broader remit and which provide many more services to students (like libraries, for instance); a decline in training standards; and inadequate ability to concentrate resources into areas of key skills need. ‘Everything we warned about is coming true,’ says Brian Hughes, NTEU TAFE Branch Vice-President, who works at Kangan Institute of TAFE, ruefully. ‘The new funding arrangements are essentially about shifting money from the public TAFEs to private businesses. It puts at risk all those decades of public investment in skills training – all because of the ideological obsessions of treasury bureaucrats and politicians.’ The Government’s funding changes include: u A significant cut in funding from the budgets of the eight biggest TAFEs. u Increase in apprenticeship course fees of almost 60%.
u The scrapping of limits on course fees.
u Changes to the industry weightings, that will see cuts in the amounts of money provided for certain courses, such as tourism, recreation and fitness training.
The latter change will also see some private providers lose funding, especially those that saw opportunities to cherry pick these popular courses. But this just points out that an unplanned market-based system leads to inefficiencies in resource allocation that have to be corrected down the track. Brian and Janet are already starting to hear of the redundancies that the NTEU warned about. ‘Public TAFE institutions get more funding per student than private providers for a good reason – they have a broader social responsibility and provide more services for students,’ according to Janet. ‘Cutting that funding will
lead to job losses and declines in the quality of TAFE education.’ ‘The problems in TAFE now are caused by an explosion in the number of private providers, many of them offering cheap taxpayer-subsidised courses, undercutting the tradition of high quality education provided by public TAFEs,’ says Brian. ‘What we need now is a major review of Skills Reform policy, and an end to the slow destruction of the public TAFE system. TAFE staff, and the nation’s skill needs, are too important to be left up to the market.’
NEXUS SUMMER 2011
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