Training tracking up

By John Ross. MORE Australians are undertaking government-funded training, and they're training later in life and for higher qualifications, according to the 2010 annual national report on the vocational education and training system.
The soon-to-be-published report shows that the number of people in training jumped by over 100,000 in 2010, boosting the training participation rate by 3 per cent in a single year. And on top of a 10 per cent rise in students over four years, which pushed overall numbers above 1.75 million, the proportion in medium or high level courses also rose 10 percentage points to 58 per cent.
Diploma-level study increased particularly sharply, with a shift by women to higher-level study raising the overall proportion of diploma students from 10 to 13 per cent. The percentage of students aged over 25 also rose, while the proportion of teenage students contracted slightly. The federal government said the report proved its skills funding was paying dividends and that its skills reforms were on track.
“We have invested almost $4 billion more in vocational education and training than the Howard Government did in its last three years, and it is paying off,” said Tertiary Education Minister Chris Evans.
“Our investment has resulted in more Australians than ever before undertaking vocational studies and, importantly, we are seeing an increase in those finishing their studies and getting the qualifications and skills they need to enter the workforce.”
However the figures don’t tell the whole story because they exclude full-fee training by private colleges.
Consequently it’s not clear how much of the increase simply reflects privately funded training being shifted onto the public purse. RMIT University policy analyst said the move to improve data collection and dissemination, to overcome this type of problem, was one of the most significant of the federal government’s skills reform proposals outlined on Monday. The government wants to provide data on course enrolments and completions for all accredited training, irrespective of whether it’s publicly or privately funded. But Dr Moodie said it wasn’t clear how or when the government proposed to achieve this.
“Comprehensive data collection has been resisted strenuously by many private companies as adding to red tape, and has substantial methodological challenges,” he said.
Dr Moodie also endorsed the federal government’s plans to develop the unique student identifier into a national student record, allowing students to keep track of their own qualifications as well as helping in analysis and fund distribution.
“While it would face several bureaucratic obstacles and technical issues it would be an important development for students,” he said.
The report shows that the proportion of fee-for-service training by TAFEs declined slightly in 2010, possibly because Victoria’s open-training market made full-fee training less attractive in that state.