DET | 21 April 2015
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The federal government has outlined a new, contestable model of training product development. Previously the province of 12 Industry Skills Councils, the development of training packages will now be put out to tender.
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The government will invite proposals for new Skills Service Organisations (SSOs) which will be funded to provide input to broader Industry Reference Committees (IRCs) which will be the main conduit for engagement with industry.
Membership and oversight of the IRCs will fall to ministers with responsibility for skills under the newly-created Australian Industry and Skills Committee (AISC).
The following diagram apparently shows how the new arrangements will work:
A Fact Sheet explains it perhaps a little more clearly.
The Assistant Minister for Education and Training, Senator Simon Birmingham, said the overhaul would align closely with the needs of employers, “because it is employers who best know what skills and competencies they need in their current and future employees. The strengths of our current system will be retained and I will ensure there is continuity in the national training system in moving to the new approach.”
However, as Gavin Moodie has pointed out:
The Government seeks to fix the problems arising from marketising vocational education by introducing yet more marketisation – what it calls ‘contestability’ – in developing training packages. This risks all the principal-agent problems of bodies acting in their own market interests rather than in the interests of their students let alone the system as a whole. This in turn will require the Government to introduce different layers of monitoring and control, by contracts rather than regulation, but external control nonetheless.