24 February 2014
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RMIT vice-chancellor Margaret Gardner has announced that RMIT is availing 
itself of recent changes in Victorian government legislation to dump its standing as an institute of technical and further education – a public TAFE.
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She said that “TAFE” doesn’t fit with RMIT’s strategic directions as “a global university of technology and design” nor do “students find TAFE a helpful or useful descriptor”. While RMIT will still be accountable for any public funding it receives for vocational education activity, it will no longer be bound by the regulatory, reporting and governance strictures of a public TAFE. Gardner said RMIT is in the process of negotiating its own enterprise agreement for staff and work is underway transferring previously government owned TAFE assets to RMIT. The move doesn’t come as any great surprise: RMIT has been progressively exiting “training” at the Certificate level to focus its sub-degree delivery at AQF levels 5 and 6 (diploma, advanced diploma and associate degree).
You would expect that Swinburne University of Technology will soon follow suit, having already divested itself of its major outer suburban campus (Lilydale), with its general TAFE focus, and of its Prahran campus, to consolidate at its main campus at Hawthorn. Victoria University would probably like to follow suit and has set up its structure in a way that would enable divestment of its certificate level training (“technical”) delivery, perhaps in some form of “partnership” with a TAFE provider such as Kangan Batman. But VU needs a willing partner.
This would leave Federation University (formerly the University of Ballarat) as the only genuine “dual sector” university provider still standing in Victoria – and even then, the continuing logic of that depends on how well its Menzies Affiliation works out.
What of the public TAFEs ? Constitutional changes gazetted in April 2013 formally dropped the designation of the bigger Victorian public VET providers as TAFEs to institutes – for example, what was Box Hill Institute of Technical and Further Education became ‘Box Hill Institute’. The only exception to this was Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE – NMIT – which is a bit hard to establish as an institute when it already is and a bit hard to drop the “T”, which is part of its branding. It has since established Melbourne Polytechnic, which presumably has a bit more wriggle room than a TAFE (but that’s a guess).
Expect more developments in this space, with Victorian government funding arrangements imposing a range of obligations on public providers but no particular benefits (such as funding for community service obligations).
It’s probably about to extend to the university sector: watch out for the report of the review of demand driven funding, which will undoubtedly propose funding arrangements that allow full fee recovery in most disciplines (sans medicine, nursing, some of the more specialist science and technology disciplines).
See
There goes the “T”: RMIT drops the TAFE brand
