Privatising TasTAFE to fail businesses, Students and teachers

Simon Bailey warns that Tasmanian skills and technical education is in danger of following other states down a failed path that is more costly and less efficient

THE state government has struck a major ideological blow against TasTAFE with the release of draft legislation to expel its teachers from the Tasmanian public service and harm student prospects.

And spoiler alert — what follows is fee hikes, course cuts, campus closures and job cuts hurting our most vulnerable students.

The Premier’s Economic and Social Recovery Advisory Council details the privatisation model for TasTAFE and we know from other states, who are further down this disastrous track, how things roll.

In a taste of what’s to come, several TasTAFE course fees for 2022 were doubled, albeit briefly. After I publicly raised concerns about increased fees for courses like early childhood education training, they were taken off the TasTAFE website. Education Minister Sarah Courtney said it was all just a TasTAFE administrative error — I’m sure all purely coincidental.

Disadvantaged students in regional Tasmania will be worse off by the dismantling of our high-quality public VET provider and the promotion of private Registered Training Organisations in its place.

Profitable courses will be peeled off for private RTOs to gorge on while the remaining TasTAFE shell provides the unprofitable training, referred to by PESRAC as “thin markets”. When this happens fees go up and disadvantaged students have the unenviable choice of either quitting study or incurring large debts.

A reduction in TasTAFE courses creates a teacher surplus and job cuts follow — this is what is meant by “flexibility”.

Students who remain at TasTAFE will be instructed by cheaper-to-employ trainers rather than high quality teachers who will have been “flexed” out the door.

Online delivery is also cheaper and the Education Minister has not ruled out Tasmanian campus closures and instead spruiks a Virtual Campus for regional students — not a good sign for students’ face-to-face learning opportunities in future.

The new legislation forces TasTAFE teachers under the Fair Work Act, alongside workers in 7-Eleven and MacDonald’s and this paves the way for more insecure employment. In NSW TAFE teachers are already under Fair Work Act and just recently 7700 casual teachers were denied permanency.

TasTAFE is critical for our young people’s employment futures because it provides nationally accredited qualifications with skills which are transferable, meaning they have job opportunities and a career path. But the type of uncredentialed system being pushed by vested interests, means someone trained to make hamburgers for a particular business won’t get a job anywhere else — not even in another burger joint because their skillset is so narrow.

Degrading public VET will worsen Tasmania’s existing skill shortages in vital areas like community services which are predicted to undergo exponential growth as we recover from Covid-19.

South Australia commercialised its TAFE and fee subsidies were cut to childcare, aged care and

disability courses and several campuses closed — all negatively impacting student who faces higher courses cost with more limited study options.

TasTAFE is a public provider for the public good and offers courses to help people re-enter the workforce and to catch-up on essentials like numeracy, literacy and IT skills which are fundamental to filling employment gaps.

It is not well understood but industry actually designs the training packages that TAFE teachers must then deliver — to the letter.

If industry-designed training does not suit industry needs, then industry needs to better engage with the process and that is where reform should be urgently focused.

The State Government lists eight elements of the proposed new business model and every single one — with the exception of cutting loose TAFE teachers from the public service — are already covered under the existing legislation and is further evidence of this anti-public provider agenda.

TasTAFE’s performance data and approval ratings are embarrassingly high. In 2019 student satisfaction was 91 per cent and above the national average.

Completion rates are high and 86.8 per cent of TasTAFE graduates were employed or enrolled in further study after training.

Last year TasTAFE students took out the National Apprentice of the Year and Vocational Student of the Year awards.

Broadbrush criticism of TasTAFE is frequent but for all the heat, there is little light and even less evidence.

There is a plot twist in this privatisation playbook too.

The single, solitary submission to PESRAC, out of 178, that advocated for a “Jetstar” privatised model for TasTAFE came from the NCK Evers Network of which the

PESRAC chairman Don Challen is a member — how does that pass the pub test?

Premier Gutwein has been lauded for his pragmatic, rather than ideological, approach to handling the Covid-19 pandemic and we implore him to apply that approach to managing TasTAFE.

The evidence is that privatising the public provision of VET harms students and undermines their employment futures and this ideological attack must stop.