Poor pay and underfunding: why Australia’s vocational training system is broken
Two years into his four-year metal fabrication apprenticeship, William Shepherd seriously considered quitting. Earning just $18 an hour with a private employer, the 31-year-old had been able to make things work only because he was single, lived frugally and walked to work. However, he was increasingly unable to keep up with cost-of-living increases.
“Luckily for me, I was able to find a public employer that was willing to pay above the award,” Shepherd says.
“If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have been able to continue [my apprenticeship], because I bought a car and I had to pay tolls to get to work and fuel and all these extra costs.
“There would have been no way that I could have afforded it.”
Low wages for apprenticeships, along with cost cutting across the staterun Tafe system and an increasingly casualised workforce, have contributed to a fall in the number of apprentices from 376,800 in 2012 to just 134,800 in 2020.
Last month the federal government announced $1.1bn in joint funding with the states to bring forward 180,000 feefree Tafe places to 2023 but no one is under any illusions that Australia’s vocational training system can be fixed as easily as that.
Demand for labour, and particularly for skilled workers, has rarely been higher but poor pay and conditions for apprentices are among the factors stopping young workers from taking advantage of the favourable job market.
While Tafe enrolments remain steady, the number of people completing their apprenticeships is declining. One in three trade apprentices drop out in their first year, according to data from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research. Just 54% of those who began a trade apprenticeship in 2017 had completed it by the end of 2021, down from 57% of those
who began a year earlier.
The federal minister for skills and training, Brendan O’Connor, has said the government needs to do more to boost the completion rate.
“We’re talking about billions of dollars of investment,” he said last month. “We need to understand what apprentices and trainees need to complete their qualifications. It’s … not value for money [if they don’t finish].”
The government has made attempts to offset this decline, including through the Boosting Apprenticeship Commencements wage subsidy. Available until 30 June this year, the scheme helped employers save up to 50% on the wages of new apprentices and trainees.
Tafe teacher Maxine Sharkey says broader structural issues within Tafe also need addressing – and they boil down to a lack of overall funding.
Sharkey, the Australian Education Union’s federal Tafe secretary, says students are paying more than they ever have but getting less in return due to cuts in teaching hours and resources.
“What used to take 300 hours now has to be done in roughly 120 because that’s all the money you’ve got to pay the teacher to stand in the class and to pay the security to have people on campus,” she says.
“There’s still plenty of people enrolling but because they’re on speed learning and a lot of it now is online and [some] young apprentices only have their phone to work on … it’s too hard and they fail.”
Where there are gaps in the Tafe system, there are often private vocational training services available. However, Sharkey said those are not always accessible to students, financially or geographically.
“Here in NSW, they stopped offering bricklaying courses at any of the [Tafe] colleges between Newcastle [north of Sydney] and Kingscliff [on the Queensland border],” she says. “The students don’t follow because who’s going to go from Coffs Harbour to either Newcastle or Kingscliff ?”
A Tafe NSW spokeswoman said the presence of private competitors in the same market is “not a factor in determining Tafe NSW’s local course offerings”.
While the boost in funding for feefree courses at Tafe is good news for students, Sharkey says funding for courses has not risen and it is “not enough to run a quality course”.
Tafe is still battling a persistent shortage of teachers. Between 70% and 80% of Tafe teachers nationally are employed on a casual basis.
“If you finish running your course in November and you don’t start again until the end of February, how do you live?” Sharkey says.
“Tafe’s not a desirable employer now and so highly skilled people aren’t bothering.”
Sharkey says the fee-free places focus on areas where there are currently skill shortages but it will be four years until young people beginning courses now will finish their trade and enter the workforce.
“If you’re taking money away from other courses to put it into shortage areas, those other ones now, no one’s going to do them … and in a couple of years’ time we’ll have a shortage in those areas,” she says.
“It is a cycle and it’s a cycle that started when the funding was cut.”