Julia Gillard, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Education opened the ACPET (Australian Council for Private Education and Training) 2008 conference on Friday 29 August.
The speech that she gave is available here.
The focus of her speech was “the need to modernize, expand and strengthen Australia’s vocational education and training industry.” It really ties in well with her recent address to the ACER Research conference where basically she said “We should be doing a lot better“, which I picked up in my blog posting on 20 August.
Her message is the same here: a failure to keep up with the pace of change in recent years “has had a severe negative effect on our economy, leading to skill shortages and inflationary pressures that have led to interest rate rises and held back growth.”
The VET sector, she says, is crucial to the success of the “Education Revolution.” VET Reform is crucial. We need to significantly reduce the number of Australians 15-64 who hold no post-school qualification, overcome shortages for skilled employees, build capacity in emerging skill areas, and above all modernise.
CoAG (Council of Australian Governments) targets: by 2020 to:
- halve the proportion of 20-to-64 years olds without Certificate III or higher qualifications; and
- double the number of diploma and advanced diploma completions.
In COAG’s view, improving VET provision requires meeting 6 broad criteria:
- Allowing student and employer demand to drive changes in course provision.
- Improving competition between providers to enable those best able to meet demand to do so.
- Providing greater transparency to allow students to make informed choices and governments to make better investment decisions.
- Encouraging public and private investment though appropriate regulatory change, tax policy, employment programs and financial incentives.
- Providing quality guarantees through an appropriate framework. In this case the Australian Training Quality Framework. And…
- Ensuring that this does not create financial barriers to participation and that major equity concerns are met.
Ms Gillard’s vision is for a human capital revolution, with innovation and reform happening right across the education system, including in VET.
2 Comments
“Ms Gillard’s vision is for a human capital revolution”.
I think that’s right. Most presentations about education in Oz are couched in economic terms, which is where they usually stay. Its also mostly about “teaching”, almost never about learning. So the focus never gets out of the classroom or institutional “framework’ and up to the national, and public libraries, and broadcasters; where most learning happens.
Scuse me, I have to attend a teacher’s strike.
I think a lot of what people are uncomfortable about is change management, and of course that is unavoidably happening in an economic environment.
The focus tends to be on what else should be done, rather than looking critically at what no longer needs to (or should be) done. “And you should also be doing…” creates the underlying feeling that someone important thinks you are not fully occupied now.
Many educators, whatever sector they are in, have the feeling that they are already working to capacity, and I haven’t heard too many cases of “of course, you no longer need to do xxxxx”, just a lot of stuff about working faster, smarter, or also including xxx and yyy.
I think much of the reform capacity is already being consumed by completion of the pedestrian day to day processes, with not a lot of thought being given to what trade offs there might be. Sometimes the only way to create more time is to cease to do something else.
Post a Comment