Vocational Voices: Season 10, Episode 1
Building inclusive VET systems and pathways
Steve Davis (00:04)
Hello and welcome to Vocational Voices, the official podcast of the National Centre for Vocational Education Research or NCVER for short. I'm Steve Davis and today's episode recaps some of the major themes covered at the 34th National VET Research Conference, ‘No Frills’, which was co-hosted with TAFE Queensland in the Gold Coast, in Queensland of course, from Wednesday July 9th to Friday July 11th, 2025.
This year's conference theme, Diverse Voices in VET, highlighted the importance of amplifying the perspectives of a broad range of stakeholders within the VET sector. It fostered dialogue around unique challenges and opportunities, showcasing how diverse contributions can shape the future of VET. More information, papers and presentations from ‘No Frills’ 2025 will remain available on the NCVER website, which is ncver.edu.au.
Steve Davis (01:08)
In this two-part series, we'll be bringing you highlights from 10 of the compelling presentations from the conference. The first episode, Building Inclusive VET Systems and Pathways, focuses on the structural and methodological aspects of creating inclusive VET systems, essentially the how of designing and delivering inclusive education. Would explore inclusive approaches to VET design and delivery, inclusive training practices for a diverse workforce, strengthening pathways into VET and beyond for diverse learners, and building digital literacy for a diverse learner base. Well, let's dive into the first set of our conversations.
Our first guests are Eve Price, portfolio manager at ConCove, joined by Karl Hartley from Epic Learning. Their presentation at ‘No Frills’ 2025 explored how AI can enhance inclusivity and personalisation in VET assessment design.
Eve and Karl, welcome to Vocational Voices.
Eve Price (02:14)
Thanks for having us, Steve.
Karl Hartley (02:15)
Thanks.
Steve Davis (02:16)
Eve, I wonder if you could start us off by walking us through how AI generated assessments can specifically adapt to diverse learner needs, particularly when you're considering there's different work experience levels and literacy requirements.
Eve Price (02:32)
Absolutely. I think even before we get to that layer of personalising and contextualising for learners, there's a layer above that which is personalising and contextualising to industry itself. So if we take the example of health and safety, which is the most widely assessed standards in New Zealand at least, and I would imagine Australia is a similar scenario, you currently have to write individual assessments for health and safety in hairdressing, fruit picking, forestry, plumbing, carpentry, etc., etc., etc.
That obviously takes time, which takes money, and delays that time to market. So I think the first layer of personalisation and contextualisation is taking the baseline assessment, contextualising it to the relevant industry in a much more rapid turnaround and without the current workload associated with that process.
Then we get to the fun stuff around the learner personalisation. There's opportunity to include whatever entry testing, literacy and numeracy testing people might have to go through as part of their enrolment process. There's opportunity to include that, to feed into the background data that we have on a learner.
There's opportunity to include ethnicity. There's opportunity to include neurodiversity. There's opportunity to include gender. There's opportunity to include work experience, age, all of those things and all of the crossover between all of those elements because at the moment we can design for one of those things, but we can rarely design for three of those things at once. So that's really the opportunity that we have here with this.
And the ultimate integration mode would be to have this integrated with your LMS, your Learner Management System, and have that real-time feedback of, Steve got question three wrong last week, let's ask Steve again about question three, rewording it perhaps to make sure that he doesn't recognise that it's question three again. But that for me really is the holy grail of personalised education.
Steve Davis (04:30)
Karl, I wonder if I can turn to you next, because your initial proof of concept findings around assessment personalisation sound promising. What specific results have you seen regarding efficiency while still maintaining rigorous moderation standards?
Karl Hartley (04:47)
It was interesting because I kind of need to say how we started to show you where we ended, right? So the big goal we had when we started this project was can we get AI to mimic what an instructional designer would do when they're writing an assessment? And can it mirror it and how far along the chain can we go and be successful? So that's where we started with it.
And as we kind of developed the prompting and kind of moved forward, we started realising with the results coming out, and especially as we go through moderation, is that the personalisation element was changing the assessment in a positive way and we're getting good results. But what made our experts go crazy with excitement is the AI recognised that assessment, giving additional information for the assessor, was the goal.
So when you're working with someone who maybe have English as a second language, giving the assessor different notes on how to deliver that type of question or that role play, allowed additional time for the assessment. And that is blowing our mind because we were living in our normal world of writing assessment. They're always thinking in a space where it's how do we make the environment better for the learner? How do we get the assessor on board? And this week got our feedback through the roof around this is a space we can spend more time personalising the actual assessment experience.
Steve Davis (06:10)
Your mind's blown. Uh, mine just blew as well. That's incredible. And even what Eve mentioned before about circling back with the question I missed last time, rewording it. It just leads to more thorough process of assessing. Let's move on because I, you could take me down a rabbit hole very easily.
Karl Hartley (06:33)
Yeah.
Steve Davis (06:34)
Eve, when we talk about implementing AI assistant assessment generation, what are the key considerations around quality insurance and stakeholder engagement that VET practitioners should be thinking about?
Eve price (06:48)
I think to start with, there has to be transparency. If this is how you as an organisation or a provider want to be working, you have to be upfront and overt about this. Because too often AI is being used in the background and in the dark. Actually, we're all using it, but we're not all saying that we're using it. We do need to flip the script on that a little bit, I think. Education is in a great place to lead that change, that cultural change around AI.
Secondly, it's also going to be important to place yourself as a leader in that space because you're going to be part of that change-making that is required for your end users. So whether that be your learners, your industry, whatever support around your delivery mechanisms. So that has to be done in conjunction with those stakeholders. Thirdly, of course, is the actual quality assurance part that we all have to engage with pre-moderation, post-moderation at an organisational level, but also at an individual teacher or assessor level. And so it's going to be important to ensure that our moderation processes have considered how they want to handle AI-generated assessment.
So if I go back to the example of health and safety, are we moderating the baseline assessment for health and safety, and we don't moderate the contextualised versions? Or are we indeed going to moderate every single contextualised and personalised individualised version? Because there's a very different scale required. And we need to go back to the core principles of what are we actually quality assuring and why to make sure that we are sticking to our guns and that we're not creating more work for ourselves, but that we are still indeed maintaining those quality assurance concepts and the integrity of the assessment piece and the validity of the assessment piece.
Equally in that space, we need to consider what it is that we are feeding the AI. So in our instance, we use skill standards and learning outcomes, but skill standards and learning outcomes aren't currently written with AI in mind. So there might also needs to be a little bit of work to be done around how we design the front-end pieces that we then use to scaffold AI generated assessments. And I think that that's something that we want to consider more broadly as we look at all of our educational products and how they will in turn interact with AI, whether that be qualifications, programs and curricula, unit or skill standards, micro credentials. How are these documents being written with the future AI intended usage in mind.
Steve Davis (09:25)
I'm heartened by the human still being in the loop because while we're talking quality insurance and, Karl, you might have a couple of thoughts on this, to guide against hallucination, which we are aware that AI models can have dalliances with. Is that the role of the human to make sure that those hallucinations kept in check or are they so minimal now in the way that these models are being primed for this use?
Karl Hartley (09:54)
The skill set for when you're assess, like when you're reviewing AI generated content for assessments is a totally different skill set than if you were QA-ing a human. Humans make grammar mistakes. AI write in a particular way, right? So you need to redevelop these skills to know what to look for to understand what's good. And one of the underpinning pieces of all the research that we've done is you won't get great results until you know what good looks like. What is gold standard? Then you can help the AI get there. If you have no idea and you're trusting the AI, that's when you get hallucinations you don't want.
Steve Davis (10:31)
If we move just beyond personalised assessments, where else do you see opportunities for AI to create more accessible and relevant assessment experiences in the VET space?
Eve Price (10:43)
I'm most excited about the opportunities for standard setting and for RPL, recognition of prior learning. Both of these processes are currently very manual. There's a lot of stakeholder engagement and surveys and feedback and these quite manual processes, that take a lot of time to elicit the feedback and then there's a lot of work to go through the feedback. And these things mean that it is very difficult for vocational education to be in step with what industry are currently doing.
In New Zealand, we review qualifications every five years. And depending on the topic, some of the aspects of the qualification don't change at all in that five-year period. And some of the aspects of that qualification could actually change on a yearly basis. I think with the AI opportunity here, we are able to condense those timeframes and be much more considerate, much more considered, and a lot faster in that time to market in reviewing aspects of our qualifications.
In particular, if we then consider the stackability of micro-credentials, if we think about a qualification made up of three or four micro-credentials, we could review one or several of those component micro-credentials on a much more recent basis to ensure that the content is aligned and as accurate and as up-to-date as possible.
Secondly, recognition of prior learning. There's some great work happening. It's an international collaboration, but it's been led by South Africa. This has been regarding RPL at an international level. Ironically, it's often easier to do recognition of prior learning across international frameworks than it is nationally because local providers tend not to want to share their information as much as international information is readily available to us. So from an international perspective, we have this great opportunity to educate and train the AI models on international frameworks. We know that there are definitely strong influxes from certain countries or certain areas. So we could definitely educate an AI model and a GPT on specific frameworks and specific education systems to allow for that transference, portability, recognition to be a lot more seamless.
We know that RPL takes a lot of time and energy. The AI would do this a lot faster probably with a bit more consistency than some of our human colleagues are able to achieve. So I think that RPL piece is really exciting in terms of future opportunities here.
Steve Davis (13:19)
So a human in the loop is almost always the best way.
Eve Price (13:23)
Almost always the best way.
Steve Davis (13:25)
Look, this has been fascinating, but in closing, Karl, perhaps I'll finish with you. For VET practitioners who might be curious but cautious about exploring AI for assessment design, what practical first steps would you recommend?
Karl Hartley (13:40)
First of all, you need to get amongst it. It's something that is constantly changing. So that prompt you wrote two years ago is not up to standard now. So you need to keep developing your skills. It is still a bit of an art form, but you need to keep practicing to move on.
But here's my two biggest tips. First of all, collect examples that you would call your gold standard. AIs respond to examples incredibly well. So instead of getting the AI to guess, give it a couple of examples. When you start doing that, you're going to 10x how good your results are straight away.
Also, when you're building your frameworks, don't be happy with your first result. I've seen it too many times where someone will just generate, I love it, share their prompt with their team, and they find out it's only one in 10. AI is non-deterministic. It means it changes. So you need to be robust with your checks, or else you could be sending a dud prompt that only works one in 10 instead of eight out, no, nine out of 10. It's never going to be 100%. It's the nature of AI.
Steve Davis (14:42)
Well, I think we've been inspired and also chastened in equal measure with this chat. Eve and Karl, thanks very much for being part of Vocational Voices.
Eve Price (14:52)
Thank you very much, Steve.
Karl Hartley (14:53)
Thanks Steve.
Steve Davis (15:04)
Next up we have Dr Rocco Guarnaccia, Head of Vocational Education and Training at VETAssess. Rocco's presentation, Profit before pedagogy: examining the success and failure of private providers in Australia's vocational education and training market, delved into the sustainability of commercial for-profit VET providers.
Rocco, welcome to Vocational Voices.
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (15:30)
Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for your time and for your interest.
Steve Davis (15:33)
Your research title mentions profit before pedagogy. What evidence did you find that profit first approaches can actually undermine educational outcomes and long-term sustainability?
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (15:47)
So, Stephen, just to recap a little bit, my thesis I completed was on three areas and the profit was one chapter. So the three areas that I focused on for organisational sustainability was on business sustainability, corporate governance sustainability and pedagogy sustainability. So those three are areas that are focused on which made the difference between which providers failed and the ones that succeeded.
So the profit for before pedagogy was a part of one of my chapters, which is chapter six, if I remember correctly, on pedagogy. And it focused on what you would think would be the key component of education is the science and the aspect of teaching. And one of the things that we found throughout my research was quite consistent across all three areas was that the financial dollar, the money came before everything else for these providers. Regardless of what it was, it was boiled down to how much is it going to cost us? Are we going to make money out of it? If the answer was it's going to cost us too much, we're going to make no money out of it, that pushed it aside.
Steve Davis (16:48)
As simple as that.
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (16:49)
Absolutely, as simple as that. Remembering that these providers once, well they’re termed prior providers, but I've termed them commercial for-profit providers because that's what they are. And they might be public listed companies, they might be trustees, they might be single owned, but what they are all in common is they are for profit. These providers are for profit. The non-for-profit, there is some community-based organisations. All these people are focused on is making money. And that's why they got into it.
So the other aspect which we found was that the majority of these providers were run or owned by individuals or a group of individuals who had no experience in education, no qualification in education, and never ran or worked in an education provider. They had purely entered the market, again, to make money.
Steve Davis (17:36)
Little flavours of that pop up in a number of the interviews in this ‘No Frills’ collection, by the way, you'll be interested to know. When we actually compare successful private providers with those that failed, what pedagogical practices distinguished the survivors from those that didn't make it.
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (17:56)
The main focus of the survivors, and we would call them training, so I had two groups, the training providers who have been operating for 10 years plus, and the non-training providers, the ones that had closed down. And as I said in my presentation, what's interesting, I completed the research in February 2020. So that was just before COVID hit. So these providers, group, there was nine providers I interviewed. Since that time, so what's that? That's five years plus, we've had COVID, we've had changes in Commonwealth and State legislation, funding requirements, governments have changed. All these providers that I conducted my interview for, that were trading, are still operational. So it shows you that what they're doing was actually correct, because after five years down the track, after everything had gone through, these guys are still operating.
Now the main thing that they focus on, or the main reason why these guys survive, and the pedagogical aspect is, they focus on the student outcomes. What is the best that we can do to make sure the student, will acquire the skills and the graduate attributes to make sure they're successful in their chosen field. It is whatever we can do to make sure that they have acquired the best skills and knowledge after they completed their course. Example is these providers, most of had incorporated work placement as part of their course of study, where what you find is a lot of courses don't require or mandated to do that. But these people went above and beyond that to make sure that these students got a real-life example of what area they were focusing in.
So the main focus was the student-graduate attributes to make sure they were qualified and competent at the end of their course.
Steve Davis (19:29)
So just coming back to what you mentioned in the beginning. Did these surviving ones that are working and thriving, did they still check the money being in net positive profit first and then these outcomes? Or was it vice versa or were they in parallel?
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (19:49)
Interesting, good comment.
My end result, one of my findings is that all three must go hand in hand, which is corporate governance, business and pedagogy. But one of the best providers that I reviewed, and I did a fair bit of research into them in the regional area, what I found was that the byproduct of them being successful and offering a quality product was they made money. Their focus wasn't making money. It was purely, they're very limited into research because the word of mouth was quite big for what they've done. But it was a byproduct because they were so successful in what they did. They produced such quality outcomes and students were such great graduates. Employees wanted to employ these people. Employees worked in with them. Employees would come in and be guest speakers into their courses. Their byproduct was, they made money. So their focus wasn't making money. Their focus was what can we do and what do we need to do to make sure we offer the best course and we track the most students who want to do this program with us, and the byproduct is they made money from it.
Steve Davis (20:47)
Success breeds success.
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (20:48)
Absolutely.
Steve Davis (20:50)
Now you've seen the impact when numerous private training providers close their doors and disrupt thousands of students. Picking up on the governance and business practices, what could have been done to prevent these failures?
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (21:04)
Yeah, that's a very good question, Stephen. It's probably the flavour of the month. In the last eight months, we've had nine RTOs that have closed down. There's been three in last three months, one in last week nine RTOs which so far have revoked 23,000 qualifications from their study. These are students that have got qualifications, have got jobs, have got promotions, or gone on to get permanent residency based on qualifications that have now been revoked. So that's 23,000 qualifications that we're talking at the moment. So it is a real issue and from my understanding, it is not the last. There'll be more to be closed down in the near future.
What can we do about that? I think ASQA has done a good job in the last couple of months. They've really picked up their game and they've really tried to rectify some of issues. I think one of the main things is we need to make sure before we give accreditation to an RTO, we need to make sure we check the background of the individuals and make sure we not only check the paperwork, the policies, the procedures, because let's be honest, anybody can pay someone to write them. It’s to have a look at the individual who's going to be running them. Let's have a look at the background of these people, where they come from. Let's look at the quality of their training assessment resources and let's look at them and say, maybe we give them a provisional licence and after six months we go back and say, okay, what are you guys actually doing?
And going further to that, I will do what's called an independent assessment. So after six months or a year, we go back and say, okay, you deliver, for example, certificate three commercial cookery. Can you give me two of your graduates that have graduated that? Let's put them into a restaurant here. Just get them to turn up at nine o'clock in the morning. Okay, great, I want you to cook me an entree, a main dessert, these are the ingredients, knock yourself out, you've got three hours to go. That is where the proof is, it's quality outcomes. Not about paperwork, not about what assessments you produce, because we've got another challenge thing called AI, which is producing fantastic assignments at the moment.
If you ask someone to turn up with a chicken, some egg and some flour, and cook me a Kiev, AI can't help you in that area.
Steve Davis (23:05)
So the proof is in the pudding.
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (23:06)
Absolutely. Remember, vocational-based, vocational qualifications, its competency based. We have to demonstrate and show us what you do. So the best way of doing that is demonstrate for me. You've qualified as a hairdresser. I want you to cut me a layered haircut. I want you to do me a full tips. Show me you've got three hours to do it within and I'm going to observe you do it. So regardless of what assessment you give me is a written portfolio of evidence. I want to see you do it. Motor mechanic, show me how you're going to tune that car. You've got two hours. An independent assessment removed from any of the paperwork is a way we get around this because you can't cut corners around that or you can't fudge that any way.
And this is even before AI. Remember these qualifications have been revoked to 23,000 I said earlier. This is before AI. Now we haven't even started into that world where AI comes into it and starts developing assessments and a portfolio and evidence, or even down the track we'll start producing an AQF level certificate. Then what are we going to do? So we haven't even started that AI yet.
Steve Davis (24:06)
What about oversight boards that might be in place to make sure an RTO is running? Are they mandated? Is that an option that some choose and some don't?
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (24:16)
No, that's not a requirement. So we have our sister organisation called TEQSA who looks after higher education. One of the requirements for a higher education institution is they must have governing bodies, academic body and a board of directors. The governing framework within TEQSA is much more rigid and requires a lot more requirements.
For example, for the last in 2024, there was 222 registered training organisations accredited in ASQA, 222. And about 198 of them were private providers, commercial for profit. At the same time, TEQSA had accredited eight at the same time. So the requirements to get accredited to become a higher education institution is a lot more onerous and a lot more involved and does require that oversight of a board, academic board.
In the VET sector, we don't require that. And that's why you have these providers that are individual or maybe a group of companies or even public listed companies. But when they're a public listed company, you’ve got to remember they don't look at your training assessment strategies, your assessment tools. There's requirements to ASIC, but not the requirements in relation to pedagogy. Those things are the major issue for these stakeholders. And stakeholders' main focus is returning to the shareholder. That's their main focus, and their only focus.
Steve Davis (25:34)
Should that be changed?
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (25:35)
Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm not a big fan of public listed companies being involved in the VET sector because the majority of public listed companies, as I said earlier, is focused, is just returning on a shareholder and making money. And what you'll find is, and I've read a number of minutes from public listed companies who have education, specifically vocational education, and there's very rarely any mentioning about student outcomes, student attributes, education and training, assessment tools, validation, there's none of that. It's all about how do we increase student numbers, how do we increase profitability? What courses should we focus on next?
Steve Davis (26:12)
For policymakers trying to regulate this space effectively, what insights from your research could help them better assess provider viability before problems emerge?
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (26:23)
I would think there is a fit and proper requirements at the moment through ASQA, through the 2025 standards. Which has been improved, the requirements. I think we need to go a little bit more. And one thing that we seem to miss is the corporate governance. What is the corporate governance of the organisation? We don't delve into that enough.
What is the requirements of the leadership team? Who are the leadership team and what do they do? How is the organisation structured? What is the transparency of the accountability? Basic corporate governance requirements aren't delved into a lot. And that's, think that's chapter five in my thesis. And as an area to be honest with you, I hadn't thought about a lot until I did my research.
Because corporate governance, I just thought, okay, someone runs or owns it. But I just realised how important corporate governance is in relation to communication, in relation to internal and external stakeholders, so your students, as well as the employers outside. The transability of the information, the communication, the accountability, which seems to be lacking in a lot of these. So the corporate governance is something that I think needs to be looked at a little bit more. And as I said, I think ASQA’s doing a good job and they are on the right track. They are heading down the right track and doing the right things. Hence, at the moment, the vocational training is getting shaken and we're just seeing who's hanging on. At the moment, there's not many hanging on.
Steve Davis (24:41)
How do you see the balance between commercial viability and educational quality evolving in the VET sector?
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (27:50)
We need pride providers. At the moment, about 75 % of the vocational training is done by private providers. So 5.1 million students under the talk of VET training in the last year, 2023, the largest stats, 75 % of that was private providers. If we didn't have private providers, our TAFE system wouldn't be able to handle it. So we need them. And there is some really good quality providers out there who do niche areas and special in some regional areas. So we do need them. Do we need 3,946, which is what we have at the moment, and then of them 3,200 are private providers? I don't believe we need that many. And we won't have that many.
In the peak in 2010 - 2012, we had 5,396 providers. So we've lost about 13, 1400. But at the same time at a peak in 2010 - 2012 is when we had a VET fee help debacle. We had international students. We had Contestable, which is state funded. All these things created a perfect storm for everyone to enter the market to make money.
And to give you an idea, we had about three times more VET students than higher education students at that time. Yet we had 35 times more providers in VET than higher education. So look at that balance, 35 times more providers than we have in VET than we had higher education. Because everyone came in the market purely because there was money to be made. That's been pulled back now. And I think we're starting to get that balance. But I do believe that in the next 12 to 18 months, the 3,200 private providers will continue to drop dramatically.
Steve Davis (29:22)
Just in closing, what would you say to someone who is owning or running a private provider or thinking of doing so? What would you love to whisper into their ear to have them thinking about?
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (29:33)
I wouldn't whisper. I don't whisper much, but I say quite loudly, read my thesis. Read chapter five, six and seven, which is recommendations. Read that, especially if chapter seven, which has got what do you need to do to be successful? And the key to that is why did you enter the market for? If you came into the RTO world because you want to make a difference in hospitality, in music, in fashion, whatever, focused on that.
If you've got, like I've seen some providers who come in and do automotive, then do aged care, who do horticulture, then do hospitality. They just chase them where the money is. Don't do that. If you're passionate about your area, focus on that area. Do everything you can do to make sure the students are best qualified and best equipped when they leave the sector, and then you'll find you'll be successful and the RTO will succeed. But if you go in there to make money, yeah, not going to last long.
Steve Davis (30:21)
Rocco, on that note, thank you very much for being part of Vocational Voices.
Dr Rocco Guarnaccia (30:25)
Thank you, Steve.
Steve Davis (30:36)
Our next guest is Rebecca Spicer, Principal Lecturer, Strategic Industry Partnerships at TAFE SA. Rebecca's presentation, Building pathways, not just facilities: what VET can do to support women in trades, focused on strategies to improve women's safety and inclusion in male-dominated industries.
Rebecca, welcome to Vocational Voices.
Rebecca Spicer (31:01)
Thank you.
Steve Davis (31:02)
Your research involved direct engagement with women in trades and industry stakeholders. What specific challenges around workplace culture did you hear most consistently from the women that you spoke with?
Rebecca Spicer (31:16)
Yeah, that's a good question. So we did speak with a range of different people, both employers, tradespeople, so female tradespeople, unions and other industry organisations. And there were some fairly common threads across those conversations.
Importantly, workplace culture is still an issue. And so while yes, access to facilities continue to be a barrier, so do things like the right type of workplace policies and procedures within an organisation to ensure that women feel supported working in those workplaces and employers are provided with a framework really and their staff are provided with a framework to be able to manage inappropriate behaviour in the workplace.
From an educational point of view, it was also found that there needs to be an increased inclusion or focus on the way that we're providing soft skills to females entering the trades. So things like building their communication skills, their ability to self-advocate means that when they're having those difficult conversations or when they're going for that job interview, they're actually provided with the right level of skills to be able to sell themselves, and to really be somebody that gets recruited based on their merit and based on their ability to advocate for the skills and the suitability that they have for that workplace.
Steve Davis (32:52)
In my decades of doing interviews, we've touched on these sorts of topics that sort of share this core concern for a long time. And my sense was things were really improving, but I also have an intuition that this emergence of bro culture, et cetera, might be tipping things back a different way. Do you have a sense of that as well?
Rebecca Spicer (33:14)
Our research didn't necessarily touch on that. So I don't want to talk about that from a research perspective. What I will say is that what we continue to accept as appropriate behaviour is the behaviour that will continue to be accepted. So really what that means is that in a classroom sense, educators have a role to play in terms of how they model appropriate behaviour and the way that they address inappropriate behaviour and that same applies for workplaces as well. So there's an indication that there is change. It's fairly slow change though.
Steve Davis (33:59)
You mentioned that creating inclusive workplaces requires more than just, and I quote, installing a female toilet. What cultural and structural changes did your research identify as making the real difference?
Rebecca Spicer (34:14)
So I might start answering this by providing a scenario that we were informed about. During an interview we were made aware of a lady who was working in a trade area for a large organisation. She was taken through a performance management process because it was identified that she was spending a long period of time away from her work site. Now during that process it was uncovered that the reason that she was spending an extended period of time away from the area that she was working is because the toilet that she was accessing was on the other side of a very large workplace. The toilet that was near the work site designated for females was not working. And so she had to walk quite some way to another bathroom, which was taking her about 20 minutes. On those days of the month where she was menstruating, she also then had to stop at her locker, she had to gather supplies, she then had to go to the toilet and then she may have had to go back to her locker, and then she had to go back to the work site.
And so that was a really good indication of where, look, facilities do matter. But it was also an indication that there was a lack of awareness within her leadership team and within the people that she was working with that really didn't think about performance in relation to needs or performance in relation to access. So when we think about what it means from an organisational perspective, I think what that example provides is an indication that there is still bias, conscious or otherwise, around how we might perceive somebody's challenges within the workplace. And then this advocacy process that she had to go through to work through that and find a resolution that everyone was happy with.
Now in an ideal world that wouldn't have happened at all. In this instance, we understand that it was resolved, but that underlying bias was still very pervasive for that to be an issue at all.
Steve Davis (36:17)
You would have seen my facial expression because when you shared that scenario, it instantly reminded me of the movie Hidden Figures, which was the women working in the NASA space program in the 50s or 60s where that was the case, having to walk across different campuses to get to a toilet.
Rebecca Spicer (36:37)
Yep, and so it does. And I guess this brings me back to that point that change does happen and yes, facilities are important, but underpinning all of that is this broader awareness of what it means to be a female on a particular work site and the needs that come with that. And the underlying bias that still kind of shadows the way that we perceive those particular issues.
Steve Davis (36:58)
Now, your findings highlight the importance of equipping women with skills, confidence and networks. How do VET programs need to change their approach to deliver on all three of those elements?
Rebecca Spicer (37:12)
Yeah, that's a really good question and I'm going to answer this within the context of the Certificate II in Electrotechnology Career Start because that was really the focus of our research.
The qualification allows the use of some elective units. And so what we're encouraging RTOs to consider is how they use those elective units to think about the inclusion of units other than those that are really focused specifically on electrotechnology. And so that might mean bringing in a communication unit so that you can then develop communication skills. Now, if that is being delivered to a mixed gendered cohort of students, there's benefit for all students in receiving training that gives them improved communication skills. Because that particular qualification is designed for anybody looking at entering the electrotechnology industry and so whether that's a young man or a young woman, having communication skills to again advocate for themselves, to be able to communicate clearly, to be able to articulate what it is that they see or they feel are really important skills and then from an interview and a recruitment process those communication skills are really vital in being able to sell themselves during an interview and to be able to write their resume. So there's a really solid argument for why those types of skills would be important.
In terms of the psychosocial hazards that present themselves within the workplace, this is where the role of WHS units and WHS content within our training can really play a vital role. When we think about the traditional way to approach WHS training within the trades, it rightly should be focused on those physical hazards or those chemical hazards that might be present within a workplace. Because when we're talking about electrotechnology, obviously the risks associated with dealing with electricity, it can be quite severe.
So, we're not discounting the importance of being able to continue focusing on those workplace hazards and the safety that is required around that. But the psychosocial hazards are also an important aspect of what it means to work in an inclusive and safe work environment. And looking at those WHS units as a lever to be able to start talking about things like workplace bullying, about what it means to have a diverse and equitable workplace culture are avenues that should be explored. Our view is that if we can start to provide that training at the base level, so at the grassroots level, what we're doing is then equipping those individuals entering the workplace to start understanding what that acceptable workplace needs to look like. They can start to advocate for it. We're going to see a bottom-up push, but equally then there needs to be, or there should be some consideration really around again, those workplace policies and procedures that need to happen from the top level down. So, what's actually happening in the workplace as well.
Steve Davis (40:22)
Yes, because my limit understanding, my dad grew up in the building field and he was subject to that bullying and being forced by a boss to go and find a left-handed hammer only to find out that that was just the taunt for the new people.
Rebecca Spicer (40:36)
Or quick drying paint.
Steve Davis (40:38)
Yeah, all that sort of stuff. Then you add the layer of gender in there as well and different pecking orders. I'm catching up slowly. You say there's slow change, but I'm seeing how this self-advocacy from the bottom up is the missing link because it's not necessarily going to come easily from the top down because they at the top have probably been subjected to this themselves.
Rebecca Spicer (41:00)
It is certainly one of the observations that we've made. And that's also not to say that those that are of a particular age within the industry are then going to be the hardest people to change. But it is likely that opinions might be shaped by the experiences that they've had themselves. And it is certainly our view that it's a multi-pronged approach needed to tackle the issue. So there is workplace cultural change that needs to happen. There is a skilling component that RTOs can lean into. There are roles for people already in the industry to provide support and mentorship to those entering. There's a policy perspective that needs to play in here as well. And so, if everybody sort of picks up a couple of those pieces, then hopefully what we see is the cogs continue to turn and we continue to see some change.
Steve Davis (42:03)
And me as a layperson, I'd much rather move into a house that was built by people who were just maturely getting on with the job and not a house built on the ghosts of psychosocial damage along the way. I want the world to move. Practical strategies now. What practical strategies emerge from your research about how industry, educators and employers can actively support and retain women in trades?
Rebecca Spicer (42:31)
I think it's crucial for there to be some work done within organisations around recognising the bias that exists within their organisations and then making sure again that they have the appropriate policies in place. We certainly heard of some great successes during our research around providing mentorship and buddy arrangements within a workplace. So if you're new to the organisation, you're paired up with a buddy, you're partnered with somebody who's been in the organisation for a while you're more inclined to feel like you've got an avenue for support, you're more inclined to feel as though you're included within that workplace and so you're therefore more likely to then want to seek out that support when it's required. So I think that one's really valuable.
Strategies around support for trainees and apprentices. Again, that if you can be it, you can see it, or if you can see it, you can be it. So if you are seeing female representation in who you're exposed to throughout your trade, you are getting that reinforced view that yes, you can succeed in the pathway that you've chosen. Those individuals have more than likely fought some fairly tricky battles and had some fairly tricky conversations along the way as well. And so providing them with access to those mentors to help provide a sounding board, help them navigate what that might look like and just, know, an ear for them to download to at a particular point. So there's a role for those in the industry to play as well.
We've talked a little bit already about those strategies around delivery in the classroom. Again, so what units of competency might we choose, how are we focusing on appropriate behaviour? Now those are all really important inclusions we feel in terms of how to move forward. And then from a marketing perspective, while we do want to see female representation, we need to think about that in the view of whether it marginalises those that are portrayed in that marketing. And so I'm going to come up with another story because I think it underpins what it is that I'm going to talk about.
We heard from an organisation who has a desire to improve and increase the number of female trades that they employ. And so it comes from a position of good intent. They were selecting the very small number of females that they had employed within their organisation in that trade area to be represented in their marketing collateral.
What that did, yes, fantastic, we are employing females. There's a fantastic trade opportunity for you if you'd like to go down that pathway and we'd welcome you to our organisation. So really positive messaging behind it. The unintended consequences of that though, was that those females were then seen by their colleagues as getting special treatment, their working relationships with those individuals deteriorated. The males that they were working with wanted to know why they weren't being valued for the work that they were doing because it was seen as a special selection process. And so while the intent was positive, it had some negative unintended consequences. And so that organisation still continues to use females in their marketing along with others within their workforce. And so it's really an indication of where the intent to do good can have some unintended consequences, but that they also listen to the feedback and then they came up with a new strategy to be able to work through those challenges and they continue to promote and increase the number of females that they have working within their trade space.
Steve Davis (46:34)
Rebecca, just in closing though I just want to step one step back because for VET institutions who are considering similar evidence-based research to support underrepresented groups. I'm curious to know what lessons from your methodology you'd like to share with others.
Rebecca Spicer (46:53)
From TAFE SA's perspective, we undertake a number of research pieces, applied research pieces, and we tend to look at a multifaceted way of being able to gather that information. In this instance, it was really important to us to hear directly from those within the trades and within the industry so that we were really getting those first-hand experiences and the lived experience. It was a challenge for us to hear the depth of voice that we wanted to hear, particularly if I think about the number of organisations, employer organisations that we approached for input versus the number that were able to engage in our research.
Now that's not a reflection of whether or not those individuals saw value in the research. It may also be, or it could be, a reflection of the busyness of their workload. You know, the electrical industry is under the pump. We understand that, you know, in many instances, particularly in regional areas, they're still struggling to find those that are able to actually fill workforce demands. And so it's not a reflection of one in particular thing over another.
But it's really important when we think about the research that we do that we do try and collect diverse views. And so when we do that, we do try and then think about the diversity of the stakeholders that we engage with. We acknowledged in this research piece that there was a limitation around that diversity that we were able to cover off on. So that was probably one of the most significant challenges.
We were able to circumvent that by doing some desktop research and some literature review, which then enabled us to validate our findings through our interview process by looking at what others had already found. And obviously there's a lot of similarity across the research pieces, which gives us a level of confidence in our findings.
From a continued applied research piece, that stakeholder voice is critical. And I think, you know, from this particular conference and, you know, the theme of recognising the diverse voices in VET, it obviously underpins the importance of hearing those voices and collecting feedback from all of our stakeholders and all of those that have a vested interest in what it is that we're doing.
But from our perspective, also a recognition that it's not always easy to get the voices in the room at the time that we need them.
Steve Davis (49:29)
On that note, thank you for adding your voice to Vocational Voices, Rebecca.
Rebecca Spicer (49:34)
Wonderful. Thank you so much.
Steve Davis (49:44)
We're now joined by Dr Caroline Smith, Executive Director of the AI Group Centre for Education and Training. Caroline's presentation, Digital skills in high demand: what digital skills are being sought by industry and how they can be developed?, shed light on the critical need for digital literacy across the workforce.
Caroline, welcome to Vocational Voices.
Dr Caroline Smith (50:08)
Thanks very much. Great to be here.
Steve Davis (50:10)
Now, your research indicates there's broad and deep industry demand for digital skills. Could we start by painting a picture of this spectrum from basic digital literacy through to specialist technology skills?
Dr Caroline Smith (50:26)
Yeah, absolutely. At the Centre for Education and Training, we've got a great interest in the cross-cutting skills that drive productivity across our economy. These cross-cutting skills, they include things like management and leadership, digital capability, et cetera. And we think that it's really important to think about the cross-cutting skills that are important across our economy. So hence it's a real focus for us.
We at the Centre for Education and Training, we're the Australian survey partner for the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs report. And that report talks about significant change that's happening in the labour market in the form of mega trends. And what that sort of really shows as well is what are the skills in the next five years that are most of interest for employers. Actually, interestingly, analytical thinking, and I come back to this kind of conversation, but analytical thinking is actually the most sought-after core skill among employers.
But in terms of the fastest growing skills, it's artificial intelligence and big data, followed closely by networks and cyber security, as well as technology literacy. So, within that, you've got quite specific skill needs, as well as more general.
Steve Davis (51:55)
That did surprise me, analytical thinking, and it heartens me because it means that even though we've got these AI tools that are promising to do everything, they are tools. And we need to have a fairly good grasp of how to deploy them and whether or not they're staying on target. I guess that's where analytical thinking brings some value.
Dr Caroline Smith (52:18)
Absolutely. I mean, analytical thinking, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, they're all things that are important in demand skills from employers as well. Those skills are what I would say is really important for the adaptive capacity, both for people and for workplaces. So that’s really that ability to be able to adapt and work with change.
Another area that is really important there is foundation skills, which actually underpin everything. So that is things like literacy and numeracy, but also digital literacy. And so those are really the are the really incredibly important underpinning skills that employers recognise are really in demand.
Steve Davis (53:12)
And I want to pick you up on that one there because AI group research found 40 % of employers are saying that basic digital skills are their most significant capability gap. What does that tell us about where we are currently in Australia with digital literacy?
Dr Caroline Smith (53:31)
In Australia, other AI group research has basically identified that one of the biggest barriers in terms of digital take-up is workforce skills. That figure around the 40%, it changes every time we do that survey. We've had some other survey results that say that it's actually cyber security in Australia that's most in demand.
So it does change as technology evolves and certainly in the survey work that we've done at the Centre for Education and Training in the Australian context, it's definitely shown. Those basic skills, individual literacy, cyber, but also similar to the World Economic Forum work that increase in big data and AI. But research as well that the Centre for Education and Training has done has identified that from an employer perspective that nine out of 10 companies that we've surveyed identify that they're impacted by low levels of language literacy, numeracy and digital capabilities. And so all of that manifests in different ways and it has impacts on productivity. It really, I consider those skills, not only important of their own, but they're actually also really important learning to learn skills. They are some of the really incredibly important underpinning skills for lifelong learning and that adaptive capacity to be able to keep changing with as needs change. I just can't emphasise enough the importance of those skills.
Steve Davis (55:24)
Have you seen any innovative approaches to building the capabilities that we're talking about here?
Dr Caroline Smith (55:32)
I've got a really great example that I would love to share that is particularly focusing on specialist skills, but it's very much an entry pathway. And I think it's just a really exciting example I'm keen to share.
This was in South Australia where a group of companies partnered with the University of South Australia to develop an apprenticeship in software engineering. So apprentices, they complete a bachelor of software engineering at honours level, but they’re working under a formal training contract, just like any vocational level apprentice. It's a programme over five years and they're 18 months into the first intake. You know, by all accounts, it's going really, really well. And the second intake started earlier this year. I was so pleased that it was, this program, which is actually Australia's first apprenticeship at degree level, won an award at the Universities Australia summit earlier in the year. I think that's a really exciting, innovative model.
Steve Davis (56:46)
Beyond formal training programs, what role do you see for governments, for industry, for individuals in working together to build digital skills for both social inclusion as well as productivity?
Dr Caroline Smith (56:59)
Both social inclusion and productivity are both really, really important objectives. Different people are going to be in different, you know, sort of places in their career. They could be starting out, they could be a more mature worker who has been in the workplace for quite a while and obviously, technologies are changing all the time.
For some, some of the more formal pathways are really, really important. But then for someone perhaps who is already quite experienced in their career, then there's lots of interesting sort of micro-credentials that are out there that can help to upskill. There's some micro credentials out there that are, you know, actually other unaccredited training that are really quite targeted and provide the opportunity to learn new skills like AI, like generative AI. Some, some really interesting things to out there out there now.
Steve Davis (58:13)
Given how rapidly the digital landscape changes, what are the key competencies that VET program should prioritise to ensure that graduates are being genuinely prepared for what's coming?
Dr Caroline Smith (58:28)
Both post-school education and training has got a really important role to play. And I'm deliberately referring to the tertiary education sector here, not just VET. And while this is a podcast primarily focused on vocational education and training, Australian industry groups are pretty vocal advocate for a connected and cohesive tertiary system.
Cross-cutting issues such as digital skills is really a prime example of where this sort of system-wide consideration is needed rather than sort of looking at system silos.
At the conference, I spoke about the importance of three specific forms of skills that are needed to build the skills needed to drive productivity through digital technology. That's specialist skills, so building the higher order digital skills and capabilities that will enable Australia to be really at the leading edge of technology adoption and utilisation. General digital skills, so building the baseline and digital capability of the workforce, both in vocational education and training and Higher Ed and connecting this into the workplace as much as possible.
But also identified management and leadership and supporting the tertiary system to build this capability and really recognising that building leadership and management capability can unlock productivity gains.
But in delivering those important areas, what needs to underpin all of this is strong engagement between employers and education providers. And we need that general uplift in those foundational skills, language literacy, numeracy, and those digital capabilities, as well as that broader adaptive capacity of people, just in recognition of the extent and pace of digital transformation that's underway and to be able to unlock the benefits that are clearly there.
Steve Davis (1:00:26)
Caroline, thank you so much for being part of Vocational Voices.
Dr Caroline Smith (1:00:29)
Thanks so much. Been my absolute pleasure.
Steve Davis (01:00:40)
Finally for this episode we have Joanne Waugh, Senior Research Officer at NCVER. Joanne's presentation, Who benefits from pre-apprenticeships?, introduced a new methodology to track and analyse the pathways and outcomes of pre-apprenticeship students.
Joanne, welcome.
Joanne Waugh (1:01:01)
Thank you, Steve.
Steve Davis (1:01:02)
Your research, it demonstrates that pre-apprenticeships can improve apprenticeship completion rates. What are the key factors that contribute to this success, particularly when there's alignment in the field of education?
Joanne Waugh (1:01:16)
Yeah, so the research looked into, was able to look at the data from a student point of view. So following students who had enrolled in pre-apprenticeships and looking at whether they went into an apprenticeship and then whether they completed that apprenticeship.
We looked at over 60,000 pre-apprenticeship students over a number of years, 56% of whom completed their pre-apprenticeship. And about half of those went on to an apprenticeship and 44% of those went on to further VET study as well. So that's another positive observation we can see out of the analysis that we did.
Some of the things that we found in the results were that pre-apprenticeships were especially advantageous or they, let's say they increased the probability of a student completing an apprenticeship if they were young, so under the age of 25, if they were male, and if they came from metropolitan areas, if they were from higher socioeconomic areas, and if they were not indigenous or disabled.
So there were certain cohorts for whom pre-apprenticeships were able to increase the probability of a successful apprenticeship. And we also found that the field of education, as you mentioned, matters. So students who did complete a pre-apprenticeship successfully and went on to an apprenticeship, they were more likely to be successful in completing that apprenticeship if they'd studied the pre-apprenticeship in the same field of education as the apprenticeship. So there has to be that alignment between what they've done before the apprenticeship in order to boost their probability of completion.
Steve Davis (1:03:11)
Alright. Now there's a few things we're going to go back into in what you've just talked about there. Moving beyond completion rates, what benefits do pre-apprenticeships deliver for employers? And what does that mean for how industry might engage with these?
Joanne Waugh (01:03:29)
We know from the literature already existing that employers do find value and benefit in pre-apprenticeships for the apprentices they're looking to recruit. And I spoke to employers and GTOs for this research project who confirmed those benefits, and they are that they find those pre-apprenticeship students have a greater interest in the trade. They possess some relevant skills and knowledge. They're developing those basic skills during their pre-apprenticeship course that makes them more productive when they hit the work site as a new apprentice. And they're also, and this was something that came up quite a lot, they were better prepared to work safely. So they didn't feel there was so much of a safety risk working on site.
But we did, I did speak to a couple of employers who found that they didn't see so much value in the pre-apprenticeship. And where they didn't see the value was when they described, where they didn't see the value was when they described what seemed like a misalignment from their point of view between the program content of the pre-apprenticeship and the work that they expected their apprentice to do. And they also felt that there can sometimes be a push for school low achievers, for young people to enter pre-apprenticeships rather than trying to match their individual preferences to something that, you know, matches what they'd like to do. And so experience has taught those employers that they're going to recruit apprentices for their personal attributes rather than any previous education that they've done.
So from that, I think we can guess that there are some pre-apprenticeships that are more valuable to employers than others and having that close alignment between the what's taught in the pre-apprenticeship and what employers expect from first year apprentices is quite important to their value to employers.
Steve Davis (1:05:22)
Was that benefit of being safer expected or did that surprise you?
Joanne Waugh (1:05:27)
I didn't really think of it to be honest, but once they started talking about it, it did make a lot of sense, of course. As an employer, some of those trade occupations are quite dangerous. So for them having someone come on site who already understands, has learned how to work safely is a huge advantage.
Steve Davis (1:05:46)
Right back in your first answer, you talked about, well, you really intimated that the benefits of pre-apprenticeships weren't universal. What factors can limit the impact of pre-apprenticeships and how might these be addressed through perhaps better program design?
Joanne Waugh (1:06:05)
So what the quantitative analysis told us was that there's no statistical uplift in completion or transition to apprenticeships for some of the disadvantaged cohorts that are of interest in the policy realm at the moment. So looking at Indigenous students, students with disabilities, students from language backgrounds other than English, there wasn't that uplift that we saw for other cohorts. And that, I guess that's kind of dispiriting when you think that there is some view that pre-apprenticeships offer a way for more accessibility to apprentices, to apprenticeships, and that they can go some way towards addressing the inequity that we've seen across the years.
But it seems from our analysis that pre-apprenticeship alone doesn't address that inequity or inaccessibility for those cohorts. But we do know from literature and from anecdotal evidence talking to people in industry that targeted programs at certain groups do work and they do achieve great completion rates and transition rates and with apprentices who go on to have careers in the trades. Programs such as, you know, focusing on women in trades, indigenous focused programs, we know that though they are successful. So I think the takeaway here for people investing in pre-apprenticeships and designing pre-apprenticeships is that if you're looking to target or you're looking to boost a certain cohort, you really need to think about targeting, how you're targeting that program and creating it in a way that allows them to succeed.
Steve Davis (1:07:51)
Yes, let's dig in a bit deeper there because that did strike me as counterintuitive. I just anticipated that the pre-apprenticeship would particularly be advantageous for where there is some form of disadvantage or deficit. So picking up on what you've just mentioned, are there practical steps that VET providers can take to actually tailor these pre-apprenticeship programs to meet specific needs of different student, different training cohorts?
Joanne Waugh (1:08:19)
I think it comes back to the tenets of high-quality training generally, which is understanding, meeting the students where they're at. So first at recruitment, understanding what they expect to get out of the program and also, before they designed the program, understanding what employers want in apprentice candidates in that field. That's what students have reported to me, I interviewed students and they talked to me about really enjoying programs where the content was aligned with their expectations, where they had really high-quality teachers who cared about them as individuals.
And they also reported that they really enjoyed developing relationships with their peers in the classroom. And they understood the value of that as an ongoing network within that trade once they'd finished. And also just to support them, to motivate them as they go through the course. So those students who were able to, you know, the teachers who were able to foster that environment in the classroom that was mutually uplifting for the students, all the students, they reported greater success and greater satisfaction, most importantly with their training.
Steve Davis (1:09:38)
I'll just pick up on the support word you just mentioned, because we're focusing on the actual pre-apprenticeship itself, but we have talked a lot in this episode of Vocational Voices about support generally within the sector. Did you get any sense that complementary focus on support with that same sort of tailoring is going to be important here or can this be addressed through the actual pre-apprenticeship program design itself?
Joanne Waugh (1:10:04)
We didn't get much into external supports for this research project, but one thing that did come up that the students talked about was they really benefited from when RTO had close relationships with the employers in their field. So that helped them to be able to gain a work experience placement and also to gain employment at the end of their pre-apprenticeship.
Developing relationships with employers ultimately does support the students because they end up learning skills that are most relevant to what employers want. And they're also able to more easily transition into employment after their studies.
Steve Davis (1:10:42)
Well, yes, that is the end goal really, isn't it?
Joanne Waugh (1:10:46)
Ideally, yes.
Steve Davis (1:10:48)
Just finally, look for policy makers who are making funding decisions, what are the key implications of your research for the ongoing support of pre-apprenticeship students and that industry engagement we just mentioned.
Joanne Waugh (1:11:03)
I think something that came out through this study was that there's no one size fits all. Each trade, each occupational pathway has its own challenges. For some, it's simply attracting students to want to, attracting young people to want to become an apprentice in that field. So for that field a pre-apprenticeship might have a slightly different focus on simply awareness raising and you might not expect such a high completion rate. Versus other trade occupations that are already extremely popular, and the pre-apprenticeship acts almost as a sifting stage to sift out the unsuitable candidates because there's over-subscription of young people trying to get into that apprenticeship pathway.
For policy and program funding, it's looking at how to allow some nuance in the funding that's provided and the measures on how outcomes are measured for those different programs.
Steve Davis (1:12:12)
Always a fan of nuance here. Joanne, thank you very much for being part of Vocational Voices.
Joanne Waugh (1:12:18)
Thanks, Steve.
Steve Davis (01:12:29)
That's all for episode one of Best of ‘No Frills’ 2025, Building Inclusive VET Systems and Pathways. Join us next time for episode two, Centring Diverse Voices and Support in VET, where we'll explore community-centred approaches and targeted learner support strategies. Thank you for joining us on Vocational Voices.
Vocational Voices is produced by NCVER on behalf of the Australian Government and State and Territory Governments, with funding provided through the Australian Government Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. For further information, please visit ncver.edu.au