Dr Peter Kell...looking for submissions to the TAFE Futures Inquiry.

Inquiry ‘with a difference’

By Kerri Carr

TAFE Futures Inquiry head Associate Professor Peter Kell is "looking for an inquiry with a difference".

He told Federation's Annual Conference on July 2 he hoped the inquiry would "provide a vehicle for resituating TAFE and repositioning it not just simply as superficial ideas off the back of the Minister's idea to get a bit of publicity this week, but something that provides a social, economic and cultural future to technical and further education".

The inquiry seeks submissions and will visit state capitals and selected regional centres to ask teachers, students and the community what they think should be the future of TAFE in the next 10 years.

Dr Kell suggested people in the TAFE industry were "quite sick of reviews".

"I hope we can start to engage the community more broadly through this inquiry and start to think about [this inquiry] in a more coherent, fruitful and a lot less superficial manner than has been the custom of many governments," he said.

"I'm hopeful that we engage the people that do make TAFE work, that value it and that we provide a blueprint for the future that's a platform for an accessible, quality, diverse, and responsive technical and further education system that's publicly funded."

Dr Kell said a "hostile" Federal Minister was not positioning TAFE well for the future in terms of the Australian Education Union's national industrial and skills effort, and general education effort.

He is concerned about TAFE's positioning, even in Labor states.

He said that in Queensland entry level vocational education and training was seen as a school responsibility and that the rest of TAFE would become a polytechnic.

"This is really just dumping ground-type politics," he said.

"It doesn't respond to the real needs of emerging workers and young people in schools."

He said it was important for people engaging in the inquiry to respond to this issue.

He said he wanted to reverse the Howard Government's 20 per cent drop in vocational education funding.

"We need ideas and responses about how we reverse this situation; how we commit future governments to funding technical and further education at international standards, not standards at the back end of the OECD, but at the top end.

For more information about making a submission to the inquiry visit www.tafefutures.org.au

Satisfaction with TAFE is on the rise

Annual Conference reports and decisions

For further information

August 2006 contents