Expanding national vocational education and training statistical collections: private provider engagement

Nationally recognised training in Australia has grown significantly over the last ten years. We have good data on publicly funded training but only relatively poor coverage of privately funded training that is delivered by private registered training organisations.

In this report, the authors provide insight into the barriers to collecting data on students and their enrolments from private training providers.

The authors suggest a number of strategies to encourage the participation of private providers in the official data collection, including:

• providing clear definitions on data requirements, stability in these requirements over time, and support for providers who currently have no knowledge of the current data standards
• simplifying the data-submission process through web and other broad interfaces in a secure environment
• collecting the information through a central agency, not state and territory training authorities
• supplying software to assist providers in the collection of the required information
• ensuring any system developed also meets other reporting needs (such as those of the Australian Quality Training Framework)
• developing a set of protocols regarding the use of any data to ensure confidentiality and agreement that it is not be used for provider-benchmarking purposes
• providing useful reports and other services to providers in a timely manner as a 'pay-off ' to supplying information to the national collection.

These findings are helpful in designing a better VET data collection and reporting system, one that covers all nationally recognised training.

Tom Karmel
Managing Director, NCVER

Purpose

The research reported here was intended to identify the barriers and facilitators to the participation of private education and training providers in the supply of data to the national vocational education and training (VET) statistical collection. In addition, the research process developed a number of strategies to assist private registered training organisations (RTOs) to participate in the training market and tested those strategies with the industry.

The larger context for the research can be found in the growing recognition that the private provision of VET in Australia has grown into a thriving industry that makes a considerable contribution to the national training effort. However, the nation holds only poor data on the size of this contribution, its profile, or its participants. From the private training sector viewpoint, that is an unsatisfactory position since it does not develop a public perception of the value of the sector to the nation; it is also unsatisfactory from a government perspective in that, without a clear knowledge of the total VET effort, there can only be partial planning of future growth in VET, its outputs, its contribution to the economy and economic development, and to its role in providing greater equity.

In summary, the purposes of this research are:

• to identify the barriers to private providers in supplying statistical data to the National VET Provider Collection
• to identify drivers that would encourage private providers to supply those data
• to identify some data requirements that private providers would either not be able to, or would not wish to, provide to the National VET Provider Collection
• to develop and provide strategies that would assist private provider participation.

Method

After initial consultation with the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) to establish the types of statistics they would wish to collect from private providers, the research process, which comprised three phases, began.

The first phase of the research, where national focus groups were developed, was concerned with discussions about data collection and the barriers and facilitators encountered. These focus groups involved people from the private training sector in a series of focus groups designed to identify and discuss the issues associated with expansion of the collection of national private sector VET data. Focus groups provided an opportunity for a broad discussion of the issues.

A survey constituted the second phase of the research. Using the data generated by the focus groups in Phase 1 of the research, a survey questionnaire was developed for use in Phase 2, which was circulated to the full membership of the Australian Council for Private Education and Training. The survey focused on the barriers and facilitators to data collection and provided a further opportunity for providers to have direct input to the data-collection process.

Phase 3 involved a further round of focus groups across the nation, this time focusing on the strategies—and testing them for their usefulness—that may be useful in facilitating provider participation in a national VET statistical collection. From the survey results, the research team generated a set of strategies to assist private providers to participate in the National VET datacollection system.

Because the research itself represented a valuable opportunity for consultation with private providers and an opportunity to include providers in the thinking as it developed, the process of the research was as important as its outcomes. For that reason, focus groups formed the most effective data-collection method for ensuring meaningful consultation, and the focus groups were conducted in the spirit of a participative meeting. In addition, the survey was an opportunity to involve providers not otherwise able to attend a focus group. Finally, the Australian Council for Private Education and Training kept information about the project flowing out to its entire membership each week in the council's electronic newsletter.

Focus groups were organised in each mainland state of Australia and the Australian Capital Territory. Local providers were invited to participate at their own state council office. Participation in the research was entirely voluntary, meaning that there are limitations to how well the findings represent the entire Australian Council for Private Education and Training membership.

Strategies to facilitate provider participation

The formulation of the following strategies to facilitate private provider participation in a national VET statistical collection is an outcome of this consultative research process.

• A data-collection process which takes into account the data required for government planning and to be used by the private training sector for business, publicity and political purposes is possible. A government data collection would include:
  • enrolments by qualification
  • competency outcomes
  • gender, age, nationality, location and perhaps other equity data on each learner.
• Other data may be collected by the private sector at the same time but stored and used by the private sector for its own purposes. Hence, there is a case for a private provider controlled and owned data-collection process that feeds part of the data collected into a national database but retains the rest of the collected data for the use by the private sector only, to meet its own purposes.
• The objectives pursued in collecting the data and the uses to which the data will be put need to very clear and very public. Consultations with private and public providers should be part of the process of developing and publicising those objectives.
• The data-collection agency appointed to undertake the task of collection, storage and reporting needs to be politically and commercially independent and certainly independent of any VET purchasing function. In addition the agency will need to work to a published set of service standards and ethical expectations.
• Providers need to be assured that the data they provide to the national VET data collection will also serve the requirements of the state jurisdiction relevant to each provider.
• A memorandum of agreement (or similar instrument) between the collection agency and providers should be able to guarantee reliability and stability in the data provided to the national collection over a given period of time. The frequency and form of the collection should also be a part of that agreement. Changes to these matters would occur at the time when the agreement is re-negotiated.
• The appointed collection agency should make available, free of charge to each provider, a standard agreed set of reports, with more specialised reports available on a fee-for-service basis. Customised reports should also be available on request. In the main, reports should be available online, with other reports provided direct to customers as electronic files where appropriate. The report service needs to be highly responsive and well publicised.
• Providers need to be guaranteed anonymity and protection from inadvertent identification in published reports or analyses. To ensure that anonymity is maintained, data should only be capable of disaggregation to a regional level.
• In relation to the provision of data by providers to the collection agency, data format requirements need to be excel-based and capable of web upload or direct email attachment. There is room for the development of an excel-based data format that could be used by providers who are not already adequately equipped, or for those who may wish to migrate to a different system that will enable smoother data uploads.
• Professional development needs to be made available to private providers and focus on the requirements of the data format and uploads, data definitions and ranges. This professional development could be conducted as local forums by professional associations such as the Australian Council for Private Education and Training with the backup assistance of a helpline.