Opinion piece
By Hugh Guthrie
TAFE Teacher
In a recent NCVER occasional paper, Berwyn Clayton and I examined the issues confronting TAFE providers and their workforce. We did this by taking a TAFE cut of a two-and-a-half-year program of research which looked at the factors that affect the capability of VET providers. We wanted to put this body of work, completed in 2007, in a more contemporary policy context and relate it directly to TAFE.
TAFE is being asked by governments and industry alike to be more flexible, innovative and responsive. It is a need that TAFE providers acknowledge and have actively worked to address with results: TAFEs all over the country have become far more customer-focused.
Nevertheless, TAFE is still feeling pressure from a range of sources, including competition from the private VET sector; COAG reforms and targets; the blurring of boundaries in the tertiary sector and; finally, the push of VET-in-schools. TAFE is caught between serving employer needs, with the accompanying focus on workplace delivery, and trying to meet the individual requirements of an increasingly diverse group of learners. This is a tough gig. So how does TAFE, and its operating environment, need to change?
First, TAFE providers have a variety of customers, calling for a variety of business models. It means that individual TAFE institutions may organise themselves around more autonomous businesses units, each with a clear vision of what they are trying to do while operating under a broader umbrella. This requires that TAFE’s middle managers have more control over the way their part of the organisation is run so that they can devote more time to business planning and providing strong leadership. At present, many are bogged down by administration.
Second, it is time to try to break away from an industrial relations system which is rooted in a time of less competition, no contestability and more permanent jobs. Both sides of the industrial fence must work together to develop new approaches which better reflect the ways TAFE providers and their staff now work.
Third, more needs to be known about the size and nature of TAFE’s workforce. NCVER's recently published compendium on VET workforce data provides some up-to-date information about the sector, but it also highlights issues around the quality and scope of TAFE workforce statistics. We know the TAFE workforce - and its teachers in particular - are ageing and highly casualised but data gathering and quality issues prevent sound conclusions being drawn about these trends. For example, there is a suggestion that TAFE teaching staff are becoming more highly qualified. However, we lack comprehensive information on this key issue, as we do on the extent of workforce casualisation. This makes it very hard to make good workforce development decisions, particularly at the national level.
Fourth, we need a better idea of the work TAFE staff do. This could be used to design better jobs as well as getting a better understanding of people’s careers in TAFE and how people move into, out of and within TAFE.
This brings me to a final and key point: the professionalism of TAFE’s teaching staff. TAFE staff must have the right levels of teaching skills and up-to-date knowledge and experience in the vocational area in which they teach. TAFE providers need to look at their approaches to managing individual and group performance, and ensuring that it is truly developmental.
Time and again there is a battle between the rhetoric of flexibility and the reality of operational constraints. Structure and governance arrangements, funding models, regulatory and industrial relations environments all affect a TAFE provider’s capability. Now is the time for government to be scrutinising governance and regulatory environments to see what can be done to reduce regulatory and administrative burden, increase autonomy and get performance measures right. In fairness, TAFE providers need to take a hard look at their internal management systems too.
Building capability in vocational education and training providers: The TAFE Cut http://www.ncver.edu.au/publications/2224.html
Vocational education and training workforce data 2008: A compendium http://www.ncver.edu.au/publications/2218.html
Hugh Guthrie is a Principal Research Consultant at NCVER.