Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Student Identifiers Bill 2014, which, as the previous member has said, was based very much on a piece of legislation introduced under Labor. Both sides sensibly agree that it is a good thing to provide a unique identifier number for students in the education sector. It will help students over time to keep track of their record and have ready access to their training history, making it much easier when applying for jobs and seeking further qualifications by having a comprehensive and verifiable record of their past endeavours and achievement. Likewise and very importantly, it will add to our research endeavour to get a profile of people's lives—when they are embarking on a particularly course, the success of those courses, the sequences of the courses they do—and to make some inferences about the success of the training. This is an area where we are going to have to focus much more intensely on just how well our vocational education sector is delivering for the people who are looking to it to provide them with an opportunity to gain skills that will enable them to obtain meaningful, enjoyable and productive employment. There is a good deal of concern out there that perhaps we are not going in a very good direction. There is some suggestion that, rather than embracing the extent of this problem and taking steps to deal with the quality issues, we might in the name of deregulation and cutting red tape be taking vocational education backwards.

I want to acknowledge the great suggestion made by the member for Cunningham to the Standing Committee on Education and Employment as part of our inquiry into the TAFE and vocational education sector that we engage in a survey. We have had very substantial responses on the website, but it is alarming how many people have talked rather despairingly about their experience in vocational education. Some of the responses were:

I am still seeking employment and my three certificates from TAFE haven't helped.

Another:

A lack of resources including teacher availability has severely impacted on my learning experience.

Another:

The trainers were a little out of touch.

Another:

... unfortunately, the course I had done stood for very little.

Another said the course had:

… no benefit; it has created more stress. TAFE added no value. The teachers were hopeless.

Another:

I found the quality of the education poor, I received no learning materials and had difficulties with it.

It was a waste of time!

It did not improve my employment prospects in the field that I studied which was disappointing.

I know that much good work is being done in the vocational education sector, but I do not think we can turn a blind eye to the fact that there are a lot of questions as to whether or not courses being offered in the public sector or in the private sector are fit for purpose.

I am sure many people will recall what happened in 2009 when Labor had to change some of the international study programs that were luring overseas students who were coming here and finding that the programs being delivered simply did not provide the training promised. People were being lured here on the pretext that, if they completed these courses, they could apply for permanent residency and in that process there was a great deal of sham training. This is not just confined to overseas students. There certainly is the potential for and there is evidence that there are private providers who are not scrupulous, who just want to move people through. We find people ending up with qualifications, which have been paid for, which really add nothing and provide very little increment to the skill level of the participant and certainly nothing to their ability to get further job training.

I make it very clear that I recognise the problems are not just confined to private providers, although we find more often that they have the profit motive of churning people through. There have been various serious questions about the quality and the variability of programs available through public sector vocational education providers and we need to be as vigilant about that as we are about the private providers. That is why the Australian Skills

Quality Authority is such an important entity. We are very concerned by the review that is going on, particularly as the minister has said, 'We're looking at a more streamlined approach with a self-regulation perspective. There s far too much regulation in the system.' I doubt that there is too much regulation in the system. I would agree that perhaps some of the regulation is targeted at the wrong place in the training cycle, that far too much of it is focussed on the process levels. So you have the development of a bureaucracy within training organisations that is very much focussed on having a chain of paper and not enough focus on assessment of the skills at the end of the training. So if I think that there is a problem, it is with the over-focusing on the inputs and under-focusing on the outputs of the training. But there is absolutely no doubt that we need to be very, very rigorous about the training standards and about the accreditation of these training programs particularly as we are now moving into this brave new age where people engaging in vocational education are going to have to be seeking loans—loans that are steadily increasing—and where state governments have relentlessly increased fees in many states.

Certainly in Western Australia we have seen very extensive increases in the cost of TAFE. In August 2013, for example, the Western Australian government announced that the cap on TAFE fees would be scrapped at the start of this year and we saw tuition fees, for instance, for an 18-month nursing diploma, go from $2,000 to $8,000. In that process we have seen that the number of people in Western Australia engaging in training and apprenticeships has dropped by 1,700, the biggest fall that we have seen since the GFC. This is in a state where we have youth unemployment, nevertheless, we have had a very, very significant drop in the number of people entering training. Overall, we have seen a four per cent drop in the number of people training in WA. There were 41,000 people in training in December last year, a drop of four per cent on the numbers the year before, and the total number of people starting a new course or apprenticeship was down 12.7 per cent in the same period.

We now know that the economic burden that is now part of undergoing vocational training is having a downward effect on people in training. We know from the reports that we are getting from our constituency that the cutting of a number of schemes is having an adverse effect. This is particularly the case for the Tools for Trade scheme, which was a great financial incentive for many young people to go into trade training and which to some extent offset the very negative impact of these increased fees incurred at a state government level. That scheme has now gone and I think that we could anticipate a further decline in vocational training.

But even for those people that do decide they want to stick with it, they are going now to have to borrow very considerable sums of money to ensure that they complete their training. So I think that we have double the obligation, both a moral and economic obligation, to make sure that the training they undertake, that we underwrite in a quality sense, is worth taking. This is so important for so many people's lives, and to retain confidence and belief in the system it is going to be critically important for us to ensure that what is on offer both in the private and the public sectors offers quality skills that are really going to enhance people's opportunities to gain a job and have a place in the sun.

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