Bad and good contagion – comment by CEO Craig Robertson

C’mon, fess up. This past weekend did you put a few more packs of paper for the toot in the trolley?

For our overseas readers, one of the more bizarre sidebars from COVID-19 in Australia is a rush on toilet paper, and some stocking up on food. Us Australians must care more about the end of the digestive experience than the beginning!

It’s a curious phenomenon, something that Professor Robert Frank of Cornell University, New York calls behavioural contagion.

We’ve seen evidence of it in public health. The Quit campaign and taxes have seen the proportion of Australians who smoke drop markedly. Frank contends that it is more that fewer smokers in society remove the pressure on others to take it up.

We’ve all stayed in hotels which ask us to use the towels over several days. An experiment shows that guests comply if the message says something like …’over 8 in 10 use their towels over several days’ Peer pressure endures even after our adolescence.

It’s curious to think of this in the context of vocational education and training. We know that the rate of school leavers entering university has grown rapidly as the graph from the Grattan Institute shows. The participation rate of young people into VET is a different, and sad, story. No one decries student choice and if they can get into a university, why not? The issue is whether a herd mentality has resulted in a university-only or work-only choice for school leavers.

The role of Scott Cam as the National Careers Ambassador on this very issue was scrutinised in Senate Estimates this past week. Labor senators questioned the benefit to the sector from his generous contract as he has been practically invisible, particularly if measured in media personality terms.

Minister Cash laid out plans for his engagement, including that he will host the 2020 Australian Training Awards – the Logies of VET!

Whether Scott’s interventions will work is still to be played out but Minister Cash did make the valuable point that he has been engaged as an influencer (a new fandangle occupation that training packages haven’t uncovered yet), but in today’s celebrity culture is a thing – they can start a contagion.

A contagion can work both ways – either reducing smoking or raids on dunny paper. I’ve often wondered how the VET FEE-HELP rort spread so far and wide so quickly – my calculations of Government loans to dodgy providers was about $1.5bn between 2014-16, or about $1.37 million per day over those three years. Now, that’s a contagion!

We also had during the heady market days of VET pressure on providers of good standing to cut corners, simply to survive as they saw students switch to other providers on the lure of swish marketing and low effort qualifications. Many good providers now face the wrath of the regulator as a result, according to some. How fair is hard to discern but as Assistant Minister Steve Irons says, many are small businesses which have been built up over time and it is hard for an owner to see it crumble over what may be minor indiscretions.

COVID 19 has popped up in unexpected places. A contagion for good or bad can do the same. I suspect that the fall-out from the market days is still being felt. You get that feeling from the VET Roadmap where every button is trying to be pushed, except possibly working with TAFEs and providers.

TAFEs for their part are up for the journey. TAFEs hosted parliamentarians at the second TAFE Meets Parliament event. We thank the Shadow Minister for Education and Training, the Hon Tanya Plibersek and the Assistant Minister for Vocational Education, Training and Apprenticeships, the Hon Steve Irons for addressing the crowd. CEOs and VCs of dual sector members of TDA came together in a demonstration of a joined up tertiary sector. They were able to meet their local representatives and TAFE capability was on display thanks to Canberra Institute of Technology.

Talking of the Roadmap, CEOs met the next day and committed to work with all ministers on pursuing the priorities.

Cash and Cam Pty Ltd may play a role in bringing students back to VET. I reckon a network of strong TAFEs, which we know communities trust, is a good place to start a positive contagion.