Stopping the less is more in VET – comment by CEO Craig Robertson

Have you ever measured the progress in your life by tracking your TVs?

My first was a portable that weighed a ton and if you watched more than two metres away the action was like being on the top deck of the MCG. I also remember the day my wife got a call from the bank asking whether she was making a large purchase from David Jones. The truth was I had painted the toy room that the kids no longer used and having had a bad day at work I felt completely justified in man cave terms to buy a flat screen TV. It just squeezed in to the 4WD.

The fact I needed a trailer to bring home the next one tells you something about TVs. (It’s for compulsory viewing of the Mighty GWS Giants and the Philadelphia 76ers.). And they are getting cheaper to buy – a US report has the price per square inch of TVs in 2017 as $1.78 compared to $6.60 in 2007 and $30.45 in 1997.

You may be wondering what outlandish point I am leading to. You choose. Is it that:

1. VET training products are analogue, yet the world of work is digital?
2. Students count as the 4.1m pixels of a large screen yet the only ones worth anything number just under 1m with 576,00 the really bright ones as TAFE students?
3. Our funding policy is expecting more from VET at an ever cheaper price?
4. TVs may have increased in size still no-one likes what’s coming out of them?
5. Just like TVs we are importing skills from overseas because it’s cheaper than making them here and we’ve lost the technology to build them anyway? or
6. all of the above.

Let me give you some facts. The Productivity Commission produces each year the Report on Government Services. The most instructive is the funding per hour of training (see second row below) and total hours of training delivered, in the millions (see third row).

You would expect funding per hour to gently increase over the years in line with costs of education. At decade end the rate is lower than in 2008 and it oscillates $4.25, or 23 per cent over the period!

Look at the hours of training against the $ per hour. For the years of high total hours the $ per hour drops, and reverses when the total is low. We simply adjust delivery to suit the dollars on offer.

Do trainer wages give? I wouldn’t think so. Expectation of vocational education hasn’t varied and the Wage Cost Index shows salaries going up close to 30 per cent in the period[1]. Does delivery give? It couldn’t be anything else. Clearly at the height of the ‘entitlement bubble’ between 2012 to 2014 unscrupulous providers were claiming the funds but cutting delivery corners. If ASQA is now discovering providers cutting corners how bad would they have been then?

An alternative is to blame low levels of government subsidy – after all, every business delivers to the dollars. There’s a dilemma though. The more money that’s paid, the higher the risk some providers will seek to profit. The Commonwealth had its own go at increased funding (uncapped even) through VET FEE-HELP and funds per course they allowed went through the roof. Notice the bind. Governments are reluctant to pay more because of the risk of good money after bad.

Governments need to go back to basics. Start with the real costs of quality delivery, pay for it and, by all means, account for it. The only option is to start with government owned entities and those providers states and territories can trust, not with those intent on boosting their bottom line.

The situation is getting worse. During the week, a respected commentator made note of variances of requirements across VET qualifications at the same level:

At the same time funding is failing to meet the basic costs of delivery, the expectations in training packages by industry is higher. There are too many examples of silly requirements in training packages. There is no guaranteed flow through in funding, no feedback to Industry to moderate their expectations and certainly no control from the national committee which endorses them for ministers. Joyce has recommended that the proposed Skills Organisations have industry paying for the training it specifies. If industry needs to pay I’m sure there’d be some sense.

You can accuse me of jiggery-pokery but this data is curated by the Productivity Commission, no less.

What’s my point? we are chasing the latest 82-inch Q900 8K QLED Smart TV on the budget of cathode ray tube TV, like the first I bought in 1984. You can feel free to choose A, B, D, E or F, however.