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SpeechSPEAKING NOTES FOR DR DAVID KEMP AT THE VICTORIAN TAFE ASSOCIATION
Ladies and Gentlemen: I am glad to be here today to recognise the important contribution that TAFE has made and will continue to make in training the Australian workforce. TAFE is an institution which has a long and proud history. It has played an important part in the development of our country and I see it having an even bigger role to play as we move into the next millennium and face the enormous challenges that will come with it. I’ve been asked today to speak on the government’s vision for vocational education and training. But before I do this, I think it is important to place this vision in the broader context and agenda of the Government. Australia is going through an exciting phase in its history – the economy is strong, inflation is low and unemployment is falling – a remarkable achievement given the problems faced by our Pacific neighbours. But the world doesn’t owe us a living. We are responsible for our future and we have shown, as a nation, that we can build a prosperous economy. But we can’t rest on our laurels. The world does not stand still. We must do whatever we can to make sure that Australia and Australian industry can get out there and compete in a highly competitive international marketplace so that we can maintain and improve the high standards of living we currently enjoy. Technology is changing how we work and how we do business. No industry is untouched. Our children – the workforce of the future – are becoming highly computer literate. Boundaries and borders are increasingly meaningless to them. The world of work is also changing. Outsourcing and contract employment has transformed the traditional notions of lifetime careers. The growth in employment is in the private, not the government, sector. These influences pose enormous challenges for education and training:
At the hub of the answers to all these questions is skills and responsiveness. Skills are important. We know that a skilled workforce means that industries are able to compete more effectively on quality and variety of products. Industries can enter more sophisticated and high value product and export markets. Productivity improves and more innovative work practices emerge. We know that skills are important to individuals in helping them to build rewarding careers. Responsiveness is important because the skills on offer must match the skills that industry needs to bring about these benefits. As a sector, the key is how we position ourselves to provide learning and skills development to an increasingly demanding industry. We need to keep our eyes firmly focussed on what industry needs and make sure that enterprises and students are able to access the training they need at appropriate times and in ways to suit their needs. This learning challenge will increase the demand for new and different skills and will require flexible and innovative approaches to training. Needless to say, the TAFE sector has a major role to play in this context – and has been leading the way in innovative responses to client needs. At this point, I think it is important to remember the role of government in taking forward the education and training agenda. Our job as a Government is to provide encouragement; to provide the framework; to provide the flexibility, within regulations and education systems - for which Governments are responsible, to make sure that this can happen. We must make sure that skills are delivered in an industry friendly way to industry standards within a national and international market. We must ensure that these skills can achieve national recognition and that the national training framework can deliver portable, nationally recognised qualifications. Over the past few years, everyone in the vocational education and training sector has worked hard to bring about what has been major reform. The National Training Framework and all it encompasses, the flexibility built into the National Training Packages, through New Apprenticeship and user choice and increased industry focus through the ANTA Agreement – has seen a considerable cultural shift in how training is approached in Australia. And we are seeing the benefits of these reforms. There were 206,400 New Apprentices in training as at the end of 1998 – these are record numbers and represents growth of over 60,000 places in the past three years. Never before has Australia seen such a commitment to training our workforce. These figures are a direct result of what can be achieved when Government, industry and education and training providers work together to provide training pathways for young people leaving school and for the existing workers. They are a testament to the vote of confidence that business has in the training system we have developed. One of the pleasing features is that a significant number of these New Apprenticeships are in industries which had little or no history of apprenticeships and traineeships. But we cannot be complacent. The Government wants to see further expansion of New Apprenticeships, but there are many challenges still ahead. Full implementation and fine tuning can often be as difficult as the reforms themselves. That is where you as TAFE administrators must take a leading role. You are the people who are closest to how the training system is working on the ground. You have a responsibility not only to take up the reforms that have been implemented, but you also have a responsibility to feed back when things are working or not working and to make suggestions on how something can be made to work better. As I see it, the main challenges ahead lie in sorting out the final impediments to the full implementation of Training Packages and the National Training Framework, stronger uptake of New Apprenticeships, marketing and communication, and quality assurance. I can’t stress enough how important I view Training Packages to be to Australia’s training future. For the first time we have clearly articulated pathways for learners across whole industry sectors and an across the board attempt to really integrate on and off the job training. We have nationally recognised and portable qualifications for individuals and flexible qualifications to suit the needs of employers. I’m pleased to see the growing commitment to the development of Training Packages, particularly by industry. The challenge you face as providers is in incorporating these Packages as they come on line into your training programs and I trust this is occurring. A situation I do not want to see happen is all this energy generated by industry in developing the Training Packages being lost if providers do not offer training based on the Packages to industry. We have been promising industry a training system which is responsive to them, if we don’t deliver now, there is no guarantee industry will remain a willing and committed participant. Similarly, the Government is committed to expanding the range and number of New Apprenticeships available to industry – and ensuring that these New Apprenticeships are based on available Training Packages. A number of instances have been brought to my attention where providers are actively marketing to industry apprenticeships or traineeships based on the old curriculum, or based on the old ‘one size fits all’ approach, even where Training Packages are available. I understand there are transition issues from the old to the new and that there will always be some who are reluctant to let go of the past, but this situation cannot continue for the reasons I have already outlined and for the fact that it adds unnecessary confusion to the market place. In this context, quality is another important factor in ensuring business will expand its participation in the training system. We have made great strides in getting a quality assurance and quality improvement framework in place in Australia. It is unfortunate that there are cases which are gaining publicity about alleged concerns over quality of training provided by a number of training organisations. I am taking this matter seriously and will be monitoring the situation closely. The Commonwealth Government is committed to getting the new Training Packages and New Apprenticeships implemented as quickly as possible. To this end, we are working with the State and Territory Training Authorities to achieve this. I have recently made available an extra $8 million over 1999 and 2000, in addition to $2 million of ANTA National Project funding, to remove any impediments to implementation. At last November’s ANTA Ministerial Council meeting, all State and Territory Ministers re-confirmed their commitment to the National Training Framework. They have told their Departments and Training Authorities to get on with it. You have an important role to play in making sure that they do and, during this implementation period, to feed back constructive advice about further improvements that can be made. Ultimately, it is the training providers and individual teachers that will make or break the changes that Training Packages seek to introduce. As I said earlier, I am pleased that Training Packages are beginning to be taken up. We are at a delicate stage. We have to get the implementation right. I am committed to making this happen. I can guarantee you that if, after this $10 million has been provided to States and Territories, there are still impediments, I will look at every option I have at my disposal to make it happen. Of course, we can’t just focus our efforts on the systemic issues. If we are to really grow the system, we need to change industry and general community attitudes to training. We need to promote the benefits of the system and we need to establish an ongoing dialogue with our clients to continuously improve service delivery. You, in the TAFE sector, are in a unique position to advance this cause. You are the ones who have the day to day contact with employers, with students, with schools and the community. You are the ones with the fingers on the pulse of what industry wants at the local level. You are the contact point and the face to face representatives of the training system. You are in a powerful position to change perceptions of training in the community. You obviously recognise this is a priority given the theme of your conference here today. You may be aware that the VET system is about to undertake a major project looking at using marketing tools to understand industry and community attitudes to training. This project will also take a whole new look at how communication traditionally occurs in vocational education and training. In the first stages, there will be extensive market research into how people perceive training – I say people, because in the past we have tended to focus on groups like small business, schools and providers, etc. Where this project comes from is that in each of these groups there are people with different levels of awareness of the benefits of training and that to achieve real cultural change, we have to target those people in ways which accounts for their current beliefs and values and the means by which these beliefs can be harnessed towards an objective of instilling a desire to acquire skills and engage in lifelong learning. For example, in one business or one classroom, you could have one person who has very little understanding of the benefits of training and another person who is totally committed to training. By pitching marketing material at the ‘business’ level, you are unlikely to influence behaviour as the materials probably won’t resonate with either person. What will be done is the segmentation of the market in a different way in terms of current attitudes, impediments to changing attitudes and including strategies for marketing to the people who influence behaviour in others (eg parents and school teachers). This project is ambitious and will be very important to the future of the vocational education and training sector. It is being developed in collaboration with every major stakeholder group – government, industry private and public providers and the school sector. What are the implications for TAFE? It’s far too early to say what will come out of the market research stage that will be happening in the near future or what the proposed marketing strategy will look like. However, I can say that at the very least, the project will yield a rich source of information about community perceptions towards skill acquisition and lifelong learning, and towards the products and services of the training system. This will help providers better understand their current and potential markets in order to sell their products and services. It is envisaged that the outcomes of the project will be a collaborative and shared approach to marketing training which means that TAFE will need to ensure it has the necessary mechanisms and networks to tap into what is happening at the national, state or local levels so that consistent messages are being communicated and information is being effectively shared. I encourage you all to find out from the TAFE representative on the steering committee of the project, Ms Jennie McCormick, Manager Strategic Planning and Marketing, TAFE SA, about what is happening and provide feedback through her about the project. I touched earlier on technology. This is an area which has enormous potential to open up opportunities in new communication technologies, teaching methods and multi-media courseware for providing up-to-date skills in a timely and efficient way. I am very pleased that the Commonwealth, through the Australian National Training Authority, is contributing to this important new direction through the Toolbox Development project to help registered training organisations develop multimedia training resources to meet the needs of client groups or particular enterprises. Of course, this raises a number of issues relating to infrastructure funding. There are continuing tensions of whether capital money should be spent on technology, whether we need more bricks and mortar. What are the implications of the Internet for infrastructure funding and how do we approach this as a nation? Technology makes borders irrelevant. We need to ensure we have a national approach to deal with these issues so that we do not risk wasting enormous amounts of scarce funding, duplicating effort, and distracting us from the real goal of positioning Australia in a global marketplace. We need to run with on-line learning and virtual campuses. If we don’t, there are plenty of education organisations overseas ready to take our place in the emerging marketplace. This is beginning to happen in the university sector and there is no reason why it won’t happen in the TAFE sector. I understand that Victoria is already well on the way to meeting these global challenges, particularly with the development of the gold-award winning TAFE Virtual Campus. This Campus epitomises entrepreneurship, innovation, creativity, lifelong learning, flexibility and is a credit to everyone involved. The final area that I want to cover is providing pathways from school to work for young people. Only 30% of school leavers go straight from school to university. The Government has a stated commitment to providing quality pathways for the other 70%. We are beginning to see a major cultural shift in schooling towards addressing the needs of all students and not just the 30% who go on to uni. There has been a strong uptake in VET in schools and part-time New Apprenticeships in school. It’s estimated that some 130,000 students will be undertaking VET in schools this year with up to 4,800 students expected to undertake a New Apprenticeship at school. This commitment to providing opportunities for all students was formalised by Ministers at last week’s Ministerial Council meeting. At that meeting we agreed on goals for schooling which included setting targets for VET in schools. The other change that is occurring is in community involvement in helping young people make a successful transition from school to work. This is an important step in finding sustainable solutions to problems of youth unemployment and migration of youth out of regional Australia to metropolitan areas to find work. It is a recognition that no one group can provide a long term solution to these serious problems. Government can’t do it alone. It requires partnerships and leadership at the local level. Where does TAFE fit in? TAFE is a vital player in providing pathways for the 70% from school to work. This is where the real priority lies. You are in a unique position to guide schools on training needs and options for their students. You are also in a strong position to deliver training so that schools do not have to duplicate the infrastructure in order to run VET in schools. I understand that a number of TAFEs already work closely with their local schools and I would encourage those of you who aren’t to do so. We have an obligation to these young people, to give them a kickstart in life and set them up for a productive and rewarding career. There has been a lot of work to better integrate vocational education and training and the higher education sectors, and I am pleased with the progress of that work through the joint ANTA – AVCC project. But I think we need to start re-focussing on the interaction with schools. We need to identify and remove any barriers that may to TAFE effectively helping young people make the transition from school to work. In doing this, I am not saying that we ignore the needs of the mature age workforce - and indeed, there have been significant developments in reskilling the existing workforce – but if we are serious about lifelong learning pathways, then any obstacles to this beginning from school should be removed. In closing, there has been considerable change over the past few years and we are now in a period of consolidation and implementation. Regulatory frameworks have been streamlined, industry driven training products based on industry needs are emerging. But we cannot be complacent. There are still some tough issues to address – the remaining issues around the implementation of the national training framework, developing and implementing key performance measures, infrastructure issues like asset management and third party access. Although I haven’t touched on this, I think third party access is an important issue to solve in this new era of community partnership and partnerships with schools. I understand the current infrastructure review will be putting forward some options shortly on how this might be handled. The other challenge ahead for TAFE is how it can get a representative voice in the national policy making arena. I know you are actively involved in policy at the State level, but I need to hear what is happening at the local level and how national policies impact on the ground. Issues need to be identified and responded to as early as possible. I cannot get out to communities to see what is happening. I cannot talk to every TAFE college. Instead I need mechanisms to get the information and experiences you gather back to me. I don’t have a real sense that this has happened effectively in the past and I would appreciate any views you may have as an organisation how this might work better in the future. I encourage you to think about the issues I have raised here today and I would welcome the opportunity to discuss your experiences and any ideas you may have to improve the system. And I wish you well for the rest of your conference.
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