Keep TAFE quality high, with low fees

The NSW Minister for Education, Adrian Piccoli, yesterday released a discussion paper called Smart and Skilled: making NSW number one. There follows a short period of community consultation.

The NSW Government must invest more funding in our successful TAFE institutes, which offer a broad range of high quality, diverse programs for all in the community, not just those who can afford to pay.

At a time when our nation has ongoing critical skills shortages and there are global fears of further financial crisis, changes which threaten quality and affordability will deter many from education and training.

Everyone in our community already has an entitlement to attend TAFE and receive government funded high quality training at a modest cost.

The consultation paper claims that the Council of Australian Governments has agreed to principles leading to a demand driven vocational education and training system. Victoria and South Australia have adopted a so-called demand driven “student entitlement” in their vocational education and training systems.

The concept of “student entitlement” simply means that students are forced into debt to participate in vocational  education and training, and will pay more tax in the future.

In Victoria introduction of the “student entitlement” scheme has lead to fee increases, disguised public funding going to private providers, and a decline in the growth of TAFE enrolments. Concerns have now been raised over the ongoing financial viability of some Victorian TAFE institutes.

Following increases to NSW TAFE fees in 2007, the now Deputy Premier, Andrew Stoner observed that: “The impact of the increase in fees has been that enrolments in TAFE are falling, and that is a real shame because TAFE has been a great success story in this State, especially at a time when we have a skills shortage.”

In November 2009, Adrian Piccoli said: “We have seen a systematic undermining of TAFE before. A few years ago we saw what the state government thought about TAFE students when it increased the fees for a huge number of TAFE courses making it more difficult for students to access TAFE.”

In an email to a constituent on September 21 2011, Julie Owens, the Federal Member for Parramatta stated that “COAG did not mandate that jurisdictions should implement such a system.”

The NSW Government must guarantee that TAFE remains the pre-eminent provider of a high quality, low cost to students training and education system, in order to meet future skills needs.