A new Australian tertiary education sector is likely to see a blurring of lines between the VET and Higher Education sectors as the shape of institutions changes, a recent conference on the economics of education heard.

A panel of experts came together in Melbourne on Friday 29 October to speak at the 14^th annual national conference of the Monash University – Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) Centre for the Economics of Education and Training (CEET) on the topic ‘Education and training for a more productive Australia’.

Keynote speaker Virginia Simmons AO, a consultant with over 23 years experience as a TAFE CEO, told conference attendees the convergence of the current VET sector and Higher Education sector has necessitated the change to a new tertiary sector.

“We now have a VET sector with an extremely blurred identity,” Simmons said.  “You ask people to define VET and it’s very difficult to do it.”

According to Simmons, there is also a lot of confusion about what a VET provider is, as there are over 4500 registered training organisations (RTOs) operating within schools, universities, enterprise RTOs, community providers, other private providers and the 59 TAFEs.

“The philosophy was, the more providers we have, the greater the competition, the better the competition, the more efficient is the sector,” Simmons said.

Simmons argues that this approach, enabled by what she terms an “open, light touch” regulatory environment, brings up huge issues with effective regulation and has led to wide variations in performance.

“We now have TAFE Institutes and the higher performing private providers distancing themselves from the VET sector,” Simmons said.  “I think this is a lot to do with the push for a tertiary sector because (high performing institutions) have wanted to distance themselves from what is seen as the flotsam and jetsam that has been allowed to emerge in the VET sector.”

According to Simmons, over the next decade a new tertiary sector will emerge, consisting of dual-sector institutions, of universities with colleges or RTO status, of public and private organisations offering vocational and higher education and training, of polytechnics, of higher education partnerships, of franchise arrangements between TAFEs and Higher Education providers, and of the ‘omniversity’ such as is planned for the University of Canberra.

Robin Shreeve, CEO of Skills Australia, noted in his keynote presentation that many of these changes are already occurring.

“It strikes me that we’re increasingly uncoupling institutions from sectors,” Shreeve said.  “We’ve got VET sector institutions offering Higher Education programs and we’ve got Higher Education institutions becoming RTOs.”

In their presentation on the post-school destinations of Victorian school leavers, ACER Research Director, Dr Phil McKenzie, and ACER Principal Research Fellow, Dr Sheldon Rothman, also acknowledged the changes already taking place in the tertiary education sector.  What they once referred to as the ‘university’ destination of school leavers is now known as the ‘Bachelor degree’ destination, in recognition of the fact that Bachelor level qualifications are offered by a range of tertiary institutions and not just by universities.

Dr Tom Karmel, General Manager of the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER), similarly suggested during his keynote presentation that VET institutions and Higher Education institutions cannot be easily divided.

“I think it’s getting less and less clear what vocational education and training is about,” Karmel said. “Since I can’t define VET, I can’t define what a VET provider is.”

Karmel said that in the future, instead of VET providers and Higher Education institutions, Australia will have tertiary institutions operating in different ways.  According to Karmel the possible types of tertiary institutions are: the research university, whose emphasis is on research; the omni-university or omniversity, teaching everything from Certificate 1 through to PhDs; the polytechnic, which offers high quality teaching from Certificate 1 through potentially to a Masters degree by coursework; and what Karmel likes to call the residual TAFE, that concentrates on everything up to Certificate 4 and possibly acts as a feeder to the other institutions.

Karmel, Simmons and Shreeve all agreed that the need for transparency and accountability is among the most important factors in the success of a new tertiary sector.

“The first thing that we need is transparent data,” Shreeve said. “In Australia is it’s really difficult to get data about completion rates. You can’t get data about completion rates about individual providers in the public domain.”

Shreeve, who was previously the CEO of the City of Westminster College in London as well being a TAFE Institute Director in NSW, explained that you can look at UK completion rates on the internet for different institutions, different levels and different courses.  Shreeve showed that Australia’s best State-wide VET course completion rate is approximately 50 per cent (in ACT), compared to the UK’s whole course success rate for their closest equivalent to TAFE institutions of almost 80 per cent. He noted however that the way short programs like “skillsets” are treated in Australia makes absolute comparisons difficult.

“Can I suggest that there’s room for improvement?” Shreeve said, indicating the availability of more transparent public information about providers’ performance creates accountability that may lead to this type of improvement.

Simmons said that a shared and coordinated information database is enormously important because we currently can’t really make comparisons between VET and Higher Education.  Simmons also contended that the State governments are trying to differentiate their VET sector rather than work towards national cohesion and, in order to be effective, the new tertiary sector must instead move away from State and Territory regulation and become a national sector.

“It’s a very rich world in the tertiary world,” Simmons said. “New national protocols and changing funding and government attitudes would lead us to a very strong future.”

Further information about the 2010 CEET conference is availalbe from the CEET website.

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