TAFE Queensland is the parent body for technical and further education in Queensland. The director of its international arm, Janelle Chapman, explains how attitudes towards vocational education and training are changing, and the impact recent government reforms could have on the sector.
The PIE: How is the TAFE network growing?
JC: The TAFE network has taken a bit of a battering over the last couple of years, mainly because the domestic scene has made it different. There is also that it is a competitive space so it means that private providers can actually establish themselves in the market and deliver some very niche programmes, whereas the majority of TAFEs I suppose have to appeal to the masses.
“Private providers can deliver some very niche programmes, whereas TAFEs have to appeal to the masses”
So it is more about a broad range of programmes, which may or may not be as effective from a cost point of view as someone who is a private provider that might have a business that essentially they are in to make money, to please their shareholders, so it is a different way of looking at it.
And TAFE generally has to offer the programmes that meet the needs of the community, and it is very much embedded in local community.
The PIE: How have you seen demand for vocational education evolve over the years?
JC: It used to be that VET was always the poor cousin and certainly in Australia, all across the world, VET is still considered in lots of places not to be the biggest and the best. It is all about universities, that’s the nature of this industry.
The reality is, if you are in a developing country it is going to be the skill sets and increasing people’s capacity in skills development that will increase your economic development. What we do is we act as a pathway now, so 15 years ago if you went to a university and said we want to have a pathway from a diploma to a university degree, they would say you are kidding.
Whereas now they realise that the risk is back on the VET sector, so they will put the risk back on us, so we deliver the full diploma or advance diploma, credit it to the university degree that is mapped because generally the first year of university is equivalent to what we have done on the diploma programme.
“15 years ago if you said we want to have a pathway from a diploma to a degree, they would say you are kidding”
People drop out of the first year [of university] more than anything else, so by the universities putting this back on the VET sector it means they go straight into the second year and it is a much better business proposition for the university. It is also better for students – students will get two qualifications in the same timeframe and they get a mix of the theory and the conceptual.
The PIE: So do you think attitudes towards VET have changed then?
JC: Correct. If I talk about Queensland, there was a mining sector boom a few years ago. It worked out that people who had vocational skills were actually earning much more money than those coming out of university, because the mines were incentivising them to get out there and they might have been earning three or four times the amount if they had stayed in the city.
So graduates out of school, if they went into vocational areas, were earning much more than someone who went down the professional pathway and so that changed the attitude of parents. It was no longer the dirty trades that VET was all about, it was about a job, money, outcomes, so that messaging has just been reiterated all the time.
The PIE: Where are your biggest source markets for international students at TAFE colleges?
JC: For us in TAFE Queensland, it was India a couple of years ago. I am a strong believer in having student diversity because I think it is a much better student experience, so we have tried hard to manage that diversity.
“Graduates out of school, if they went into vocational areas, were earning much more than someone who went down the professional pathway”
It is part of our international strategy that we don’t have any more than 20% of one culture, but for us at the moment our biggest growth is South Korea and again that is a trend for every other TAFE in Australia. But certainly areas like Brazil or Latin America is a big growth for us and we have big influx of Scandinavian students who come to the sunshine coast to do sport and fitness.
The PIE: Are there any subjects that are seeing an unexpected rise in popularity?
JC: If we are looking at trends, certainly anything to do with allied health, it used to be it was just about nursing, now it is a more specialised version. People don’t want the business or the retail but they want the entrepreneurship or they want something that is just that little bit different.
For us in VET, hospitality has always been a big player for us and a good provider but our big ones are hospitality, the allied health areas, business to a certain degree, but then the creative areas have really come on, things like fashion, music, design.
In markets that have a growing middle class and more spend power they tend to look at those different programmes as opposed to just being into business, and we know that there are more jobs in those areas which there probably weren’t years ago.
The PIE: How do you think the recent reforms to the sector, including the changes to student loans, will affect the balance of international and domestic enrolments?
“If the domestic market is down, there might be more focus on building revenue streams through the international market”
JC: Yes, for VET [the balance] varies between markets, and of course the VET reform stuff that is happening at the moment is going to cause a huge rethink about how things are done. It is going to have a big impact and I think it is too early to know what the impact will be, but I think the majority of people think it is going to have a negative impact as opposed to positive for domestic.
But that might in some ways feed into the international market, because if the domestic market is down, there might be more focus on building revenue streams through the international market.
The PIE: What kind of effect will these changes have?
JC: The bigger issue is the fact that the government has worked out what the loan [available to students on each course] will be. Take dental, for example. For us to deliver that programme on a fee for service basis, it costs about $22-25,000; the list for VET reform dental says $10,000, so you can understand the discrepancy. You are delivering a programme that you are never going to be able to make money on and it is not covering your costs at all.
“You are delivering a programme that you are never going to be able to make money on”
And because it is being brought in straight away, it means there will be programmes that people are thinking they are going to go onto or have already started that all of a sudden the provider is not going to be able to afford to deliver them, so it will have an impact. Again, people are not 100% sure on what the impact will be, but it won’t be good I’d suggest.
The PIE: What other challenges is the VET sector facing at the moment?
JC: From an international perspective it is the new SSVF framework, that is still kind of unknown. It used to be that you were able to work out your visa rejection history or potential because of the markets you were in: even though there were rules, you kind of knew that if you played in X, Y and Z markets, your visa rejection rate would go through the roof.
What is happening with the SSVF is that there are visa rejections from solid source markets that you would have never guessed you would get visa rejections from.
The PIE: Why is that?
JC: We are not sure, because it has only come in since July, there is this reticence from agents to not try too much. They are trying to feel out what is going to happen as well to make sure that their business isn’t impacted, and at the same time they are not quite sure what the rules are. Border protection will say the rules are very clear and in place but the results that I am seeing from TAFE Queensland are a lot broader.
The PIE: How do you see growth in VET developing over the next few years?
“We don’t even know are going to exist in the future. It will be vocational training that will get us there”
JC: I heard a quote recently from a large university in Queensland where they said that 40% of their students either do VET before or after their degree. So a degree is a great piece of paper and great to have, but ‘does it get you a job?’ is the question. And certainly, the global trend is all about employability skills and graduate outcomes.
And making it work, so you can study for four years, but you would like to have a job that pays some money at the end of that time – that’s where I think VET fits in well. We have very close links with industry in whatever we do and our training is driven by what industry needs.
I think all the research shows there is how many new jobs that we don’t even know are going to exist in the future in new industries. It will be vocational training that will get us there.
