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VICTORIAN SCHOOL FUNDING INCREASES
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Category: Education policy
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TDA Newsletter 15 May 2017
Posted at 1:09 pm
May 15thAdvertisements -
Resourcing Australia’s tertiary education sector
Posted at 5:03 pm
May 10thLH Martin Institute
Australian Government expenditure on tertiary education has been consistently at 0.8% of GDP since 2000. There has not been a ‘blowout’ in tertiary education spending. If there is a problem, it is simply that the Government needs to bring the Budget back into balance. The contribution that can be made to that objective from the tertiary education sector is at best modest, writes Mark Warburton.
While direct expenditure on higher education student places under the Commonwealth Grant Scheme (CGS) has increased considerably since 2008, this has been substantially offset since 2011 by 13 major savings measures which have reduced spending in other programs of support for higher education teaching. Overall expenditure on higher education teaching has risen broadly in line with GDP. Since 2000, student contributions have increased by 187 per cent, CGS subsidies by 158 per cent and GDP by 144 per cent.This contrasts markedly with what has been happening in the vocational education and training (VET) sector. Since 2009-10, the Australian Government’s nominal expenditure on VET has declined by $0.6 billion or 16 per cent and this decline will have reached $1.2 billion or 30 per cent by 2017-18.
There is currently a lack of coherent strategy aimed at ensuring that VET resourcing is being used efficiently. The expansion in VET FEE HELP that has occurred could potentially ensure that VET resourcing is maintained despite expenditure reductions. Currently, there appears to be substantial disparity in the level of resourcing of the VET sector in comparison to that in the higher education sector and it is not clear that this relates to a substantial difference in their need for resources. The distribution of VET resources is changing rapidly and is not fully understood. Some areas of VET activity are declining in ways that may have adverse impacts on the availability of skills in the Australian labour market.
Mark Warburton is an Honorary Senior Fellow of the LH Martin Institute. He was Principal Analyst for Universities Australia during 2015 and was in the Australian Public Service prior to that. He worked on higher education funding policy for around nine years, implementing many aspects of the Transforming Australia’s Higher Education System policy statement and then modifying them in response to subsequent budget pressures.
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The Scan 28 June 2016 #181
Posted at 4:23 pm
Jun 28th
Apprentice numbers slump
28 June 2016 | The number of apprentices across Australia has plunged since the Coalition took office, government figures show, with some of the steepest falls occurring in high-unemployment marginal seats still up for grabs at Saturday’s election. Western Sydney has lost 10,642 apprentices and western Melbourne 4782, while the national total fell 28 per cent from 383,562 to 278,583, between December 2013 and December last year, documents obtained under Freedom of Information and NCVER data reveal. Labor claims the falling take up of apprenticeships is a direct result of the $1 billion stripped from trades support programs since the change of government, including the abolition of the ‘Tools for Your Trade’ (TFYT) program – which paid $5500 to apprentices over two years – and other training and mentoring programs. The Coalition replaced the program with a loans scheme which has been taken up by just 40,000 apprentices in the past two years. Labor proposes to reintroduce TFYT as a grants scheme of $3,000….[ READ MORE ]….Labor proposes polytechnic network
28 June 2016 | A Labor government would establish 10 Commonwealth Institutes of Higher Education, on a trial basis. They would involve universities and TAFE Institutes working together to deliver associate degrees and advanced diplomas. At a total cost of A$430 million, 10,000 Commonwealth Supported Places would be available. These “HECS” places would be funded at 70% of the normal rate. This essentially creates a new layer of tertiary education, not unlike colleges of further education in the UK, delivering “foundation degrees” or community colleges in North America. Students could study a two year sub-bachelor, higher education course at one of these institutions, then if they wish to complete a full degree they would receive credit for study to date. At that stage they would go on to a normal HECS place at a university, which would be 100% funded during the final year. The idea, it seems, is to have a network of such tertiary education institutions, bringing together the best of applied higher education and vocational skills training into institutions that are not funded to do research….[ READ MORE ]…..
Vic TAFE boards finalised
28 June 2016 | Board appointments for Victoria’s TAFEs have been finalised, with 65 people recommended for ministerial appointments which take effect on 1 July. An independent panel was set up to provide advice to the government on the best people to serve across the 12 TAFE institutes. An expression of Interest process saw 513 people apply to become board members with 239 candidates interviewed. Women make up 54% of the directors. Along with the ministerial appointments, the boards will consist of the institute CEO and a staff-elected member. An interim chair has been appointed to each board, until the board elects a permanent chair….[ READ MORE ]….
Go8 propose uni enrolment caps
28 June 2016 | The elite Group of Eight universities have proposed that the Commonwealth government reintroduce limits on how many students each university can enrol, a suggestion slammed by other vice-chancellors. Group of Eight chair Michael Spence said the uncapping of university places in from 2009-21012 had blown out the budget by billions of dollars while leaving important university research underfunded. He went on that, with the target of 40% of young people with an undergraduate degree in sight, “it’s time to declare victory on university participation and focus on the core problems for university funding.” The proposal was rejected by current education minister Simon Birmingham who said he had no desire to dictate how many students each university should enrol. Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor was typically acerbic, describing the Group of “as a group of profiteers who would do anything for their own self interest. The politics of this are cancerous.”.…[ READ MORE ]….The equity of schools funding
28 June 2016 | Private schools are outspending Victorian public schools by four to one, splurging on rowing tanks, pilates studios and sky decks. Some top private schools have spent up to $70 million on capital projects over the past few years as part of a facilities “arms race” to lure students.T he state’s biggest spender, Carey Baptist Grammar School, shelled out about $11.4 million in 2014 on a new learning and innovation centre at its Kew campus. It follows a recent analysis showing the average government funding of some of Victoria’s most elite private schools increased eight times times the rate of the neediest public schools….[ READ MORE ]…..
Education spending beats corporate tax cuts
28 June 2016 | Spending on education will produce a bigger economic growth dividend in the long term than cutting corporate tax, according to a new survey of economists. As Labor and the Coalition go head-to-head on their centrepiece economic policies, a survey of 31 economists by the Economic Society of Australia and Monash Business School has found almost two-thirds agreed with the statement that:
Australia will receive a bigger economic growth dividend in the long-run by spending on education than offering an equivalent amount of money on a tax cut to business.
However, many economists added the caveat that the quality of education spending was critical. Of the economists surveyed, 29 per cent strongly agreed with the statement, 35.5 per cent agreed, 12.9 per cent were uncertain, 16.1 per cent disagreed and 6.5 per cent strongly disagreed….[ READ MORE ]…..
Coaltion: no frills
This is as announced in the Budget on 3 May – the Coalition has made no further policy statements
28 June 2016 | The government has pushed consideration of proposed university reforms, including a 20% cut in funding, out beyond the election, until 1 January 2018. While it has ruled out full fee deregulation, it has released an options paper, to guide a consultation process, canvassing a range of alternative fee measures which would still see substantial fee rises…..[ MORE ]….
Rescuing VET FEE-HELP
This is as announced in the Budget on 3 May – the Coalition has made no further policy statements
28 June 2016 | The federal government has proposed a set of tougher measures to fix the VET FEE-HELP blow-out in a discussion paper released on
29 April. The current minister for vocational education and skills senator Scott Ryan said the paper will pave the way for a full redesign of the scheme. The discussion paper catalogues the scale of malpractice by some providers, such as the targeting of low socio-economic status and vulnerable people with inducements to enroll and misleading potential students about their repayment commitments. It proposes a series of measures to improve the integrity of the system including minimum eligibility requirements for VET FEE-HELP, reductions in the lifetime student loan limit, a narrower range of eligible courses, a VET FEE-HELP ombudsman, and payments tied to compliance and student progression. ….[ READ MORE ]….
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Labor
Of its “100 positive policies”, about 20% (19 to be precise) are in tertiary education. In higher education, Labor has committed to maintaining the demand driven system, backed up by a Student Funding Guarantee to provide “certainty to universities and remove the need for higher fees”. Labor also proposes to create 10 “polytecnics”, a hybrid institution, which would involve universities and TAFE Institutes working together to deliver associate degrees and advanced diplomas. Labor proposes a comprehensive review of the VET system and to take measures to preserve the viability of the public provider network (TAFE). It proposes an $8,000 cap on VET FEE-HELP loans, with room for exemptions where a higher loan can be justified. It will restore the “Tools for Your Trade Program” with up to $3,ooo paid to eligible apprentices to purchase their tools…..[ READ MORE ]….
Coalition
Having made higher education “reform” a red button issue in its first term – remember how Christopher Pyne was going to “fix it” after it was voted down in the Senate for the second time?? – the Coalition has been totally quiet on it during this election period. It released a discussion paper with the Budget on options for reform, including partial fee deregulation via a limited number of “flagship” courses. Meanwhile, cuts to university funding of 20%, while not enacted, remain on the books. In VET, the Coalition has released a discussion paper canvassing measures that might be implemented to close down the wholesale rorting of the VET FEE-HELP scheme. Interestingly, this includes a possible capon loans, as proposed by Labor but criticised by the Coalition….[ READ MORE ]….
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Greens
The Greens propose to boost funding to the university sector by $8.3 billion over four years, comprising
- $7 billion to reverse the Coalition’s funding cuts and fund a 10% increase in base funding per student at public universities; and
- $1.306 billion into research to reverse Government cuts to university research.
They propose to reduce students’ HELP costs by 20% and to reinstate the Student Start-Up Scholarships as a grant rather than a loan. the annual cost of $1.403 billion will be more than offset by continuing the ‘deficit levy’ on a permanent basis for those earning over $180,000 per year. In VET, the Greens have a simple three point plan:
- Cease providing federal government funds to forprofit VET providers.
- Implement a TAFE federal rescue package which boosts funding by $400 million a year.
- Establish a VET Ombudsman with $10 million in seed funding
Election Watch is a guide to the 2016 Australian federal election run out of the University of Melbourne’s School of Government.
Student loan caps must be part of total redesign of vocational funding system
28 June 2016
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Labor proposes to introduce a cap of $8,000 on student loans for vocational education and training (VET) courses. A course loan cap is a sensible option, but it must form part of a total redesign of the VET FEE-HELP student loan scheme in the first instance, and of the whole VET funding system in the longer term, writes Peter Noonan in The Conversation.
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Currently, there are no loan caps for courses where providers set their own fees and don’t receive a course subsidy through the states.
The Labor proposal is to set a maximum loan cap of $8,000 per course funded under VET FEE-HELP (except for some high-cost courses approved by the education minister). The cap doesn’t extend to higher education diploma and advanced diploma courses.
For those courses that are subsidised by the states where fees are regulated, the Commonwealth and the states already have in place fee benchmarks of $5,000 in 2011. This regulated fee is effectively a loan cap.
Unsurprisingly, most of the expansion in VET FEE-HELP and all of the problems with unscrupulous provider behaviour have been in the unregulated fee area, where some providers have charged fees of over 400% more than the price paid by the states for the same course.
The government itself has raised the option of capping loan fees in its recently released VET FEE-HELP discussion paper.
It’s an option the government should have considered last year in its initial reforms to VET FEE-HELP.
The government capped overall provider loan limits at the provider’s 2015 loan levels, but while restraining overall VET FEE-HELP payments, this measure did nothing to reduce excessive fee and loan levels for many courses.
However, if loan limits are to be introduced for VET FEE-HELP, the rationale for setting the loan limits must be carefully thought through.
Higher education gets short shrift in the election campaign
A small target strategy
28 June 2016
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Stephen Parker, the soon to retire vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra, was an implacable opponent of the Coalition’s university deregulation package. But from being a red hot issue during most of the last term of Parliament, higher education has hardly figured in the election campaign. The Coalition has slipped the electorate a mogadon and seemingly got away with it. The mogadon will wear of after the election, should the Coalition returned.
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Higher education policy during the Abbott government was highly controversial and probably a component of Tony Abbott’s undoing.
Not since the Dawkins reforms of 1989-90, if at all, had higher education been so prominent in public debate.
In his 2014 Budget, then Treasurer Joe Hockey proposed to reduce the Commonwealth Grants Scheme (CGS) to universities by 20%. But he would allow tuition fee deregulation, so that domestic undergraduate students could be charged up to the fee levels of international students, subject to a requirement to create a scholarship pool for students from low socio-economic (SES) backgrounds. Commonwealth-supported places (“HECS” places) were to be extended to sub-degree courses and to private providers.
A real rate of interest would be applied to graduate debtors, existing and future, but this was dropped in an attempt to get the measures through the Senate.
Most commentators agreed that fee levels under deregulation would have risen substantially, perhaps by up to 300%: far more than was required to replace the 20% cut to the CGS.
Relative absence of competition would give most universities the headroom to do this, and the international evidence was that universities do use up all the headroom they are given.
Students would be prepared to pay, it was said, because the income-contingent loan scheme blunted the price signal.
By the time students knew what they had done and whether their degree had been a good investment, it would be too late and they would be saddled with significant debt until middle age.
The opposition Labor party built a campaign around “$100,000 degrees”, and critics raised the spectre of the Americanisation of Australian higher education.
The measures were defeated twice in the Senate, higher education was nightly news, and the eyes of the university world were on Australia.
Pushed aside
Given this background one might have expected higher education policy to be front and centre of the 2016 campaign.
But while there has been some distant yapping, this dog has not really barked at all. Why?
One reason may be that Liberal higher education policy is now obscure; perhaps deliberately so – a small target strategy.
Their policy document on education contains almost nothing on universities. It is claimed that “under the Turnbull government, funding for universities is at record levels” at over A$16 billion, but this is the result of an expanded sector introduced in the Rudd-Gillard era.
Similarly, it is said that support for students through the loan scheme is at a “record level”, but this is also the consequence of previous Labor government policies.
The National Innovation and Science Agenda to drive stronger university collaboration with industry is actually a new policy, but at $127 million it barely registers.
So, if we are to divine what the real Liberal higher education policy is we must dig into the 2016 Budget and interpret comments made by the education minister and prime minister during the campaign.
Can we really afford to not invest more in education?
28 June 2016
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The Australian newspaper has been running a none too sophisticated campaign against the boost in education spending of $37 billion over the next decade promised by Labor. It’s a mish mash of half-truths and contortions of logic, as is often the case when The Australian goes politically feral.
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Labor has drawn on an OECD report, Universal Basic Skills, to supports its argument that increased spending on education not only contributes to equity and social inclusion but is an investment in future improvements in productivity (and, indeed, Malcolm Turnbull’s Ideas Boom). It’s a proposition with which most economists agree.
It’s actually a complicated report, which can be hard to follow, so I don’t fully follow the reasoning entirely myself but I bet I’m doing better than The Australian. But the basic proposition is quite clear:
Setting aside any social and cultural benefits, the attainment of universal basic skills in a country by 2030 would have a substantial positive effect on medium and long run economic growth driven by productivity gains.
The definition of “basic skills” used in this report is “the acquisition of at least level 1 skills (420 points on the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This level of skills to “modern functional literacy” (the report has a booming definition of functional literacy (see below).
The report says that the projected economic gains of attaining universal basic skills “would be stunning for all countries – even high income OECD countries”.
In general, by 2095, GDP would be 30% higher than that expected with today’s skills level, representing the result of an annual growth rate that, in the end is 0.5 percentage points higher.
Is that really a lot?
Well, the current GDP of the US is around $US16 trillion: it would see a present value of gains of over $62 trillion.
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28 June 2016
Cartoons of the Campaign
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For a complete compendium of Cartoons of the Campaign check out Political Cartoons Australia. The cartoon below is by David Rowe of the Australian Financial Review.
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The VET Store
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The VET Store is a service by the VET Development Centre which provides access to a range of information to support VET practitioners in the work they do.
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Can we really afford to not invest more in education?
Posted at 11:22 am
Jun 28th28 June 2016
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The Australian newspaper has been running a none too sophisticated campaign against the boost in education spending of $37 billion over the next decade promised by Labor. It’s a mish mash of half-truths and contortions of logic, as is often the case when The Australian goes politically feral.
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Labor has drawn on an OECD report, Universal Basic Skills, to supports its argument that increased spending on education not only contributes to equity and social inclusion but is an investment in future improvements in productivity (and, indeed, Malcolm Turnbull’s Ideas Boom). It’s a proposition with which most economists agree.
It’s actually a complicated report, which can be hard to follow, so I don’t fully follow the reasoning entirely myself but I bet I’m doing better than The Australian. But the basic proposition is quite clear:
Setting aside any social and cultural benefits, the attainment of universal basic skills in a country by 2030 would have a substantial positive effect on medium and long run economic growth driven by productivity gains.
The definition of “basic skills” used in this report is “the acquisition of at least level 1 skills (420 points on the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This level of skills to “modern functional literacy” (the report has a booming definition of functional literacy (see below).
The report says that the projected economic gains of attaining universal basic skills “would be stunning for all countries – even high income OECD countries”.
In general, by 2095, GDP would be 30% higher than that expected with today’s skills level, representing the result of an annual growth rate that, in the end is 0.5 percentage points higher.
Is that really a lot?
Well, the current GDP of the US is around $US16 trillion: it would see a present value of gains of over $62 trillion.
The current GDP of Australia is around $1.4 trillion roughly $US1.1 trillion: we would see a present value of gains of nearly $US4 trillion – about 4 times current GDP.
Sounds like a lot to me, even over the expected lifetime involved over someone born today (which is the timeline adopted).
However, The Australian has seized with unrestrained glee the protracted timeline, with its news report stating:
Bill Shorten stands accused of misleading voters over the boost to growth from his $37.4 billion school funding plan by claiming an economic lift “straight away” from the spending despite economic ¬research that shows the gains would take decades.
n a blow to the Opposition Leader’s economic case, the author of the global study used to justify the Labor spending told The Australian there would be no “immediate” boost to growth — and that more money was not the key factor in producing the economic benefit.The editorial really got stuck in – and it’s necessary to quote at length:
Parents frustrated by their children’s (and in some cases their children’s teachers’) inability to spell will be underwhelmed by Bill Shorten’s faux promise that Labor’s promised $37.3 billion spending splurge on schools would produce an economic dividend — in 2095. Such a ludicrous, extravagant plan not only defies fiscal reason, it fails to address the pressing shortcomings of our education system.
… the Australian Council for Educational Research is the latest organisation to point out why spending more is not the answer to better educational outcomes. The challenge, identified by ACER chief executive Geoff Masters in a new report, Five Challenges in Australian School Education, is better application of existing government funding based on evidence-based strategies. Three-quarters of Australia’s fastest growing industries need graduates with strong science, technology, engineering and maths skills. Secondary students’ participation in physics and advanced maths, however, has declined steadily for 20 years. Fewer than 10% of Year 12 students study advanced maths. Fewer than 15% take physics.
Ok, it was silly of Labor to claim that “dividends” from its proposed unprecedented “investment” in education would be immediate. Of course they won’t, as Labor has now conceded.
But to the extent that benefits do flow, they will flow sooner, as well as later, and potentially with a far greater economic pay-off than other initiatives announced in this campaign.
For example, the pay-off from the Coalition’s proposed cut in business tax over ten years from 30% to 25% over ten years, at a cost of $48.2 billion, amounts to “eight tenths of bugger all”: an improvement in economic output – or GDP – of just 0.1% per year and that’s after year 10, 2015-26.
As set out above, the OECD projects that getting to “universal basic skills” has a payoff five times than that over the longer term.
And in the medium term, The Australian itself reports that Grattan Institute economist Peter Goss says:
Thirty years from now, the benefits of universal skills coming out of schools would be more than twice the value that Treasury estimates out of a company tax cut… Economic gains from education take time to flow through. They start to flow when students leave school with better skills. And those gains then build over time.
And as to the money question, Geoff Masters did not say “increased spending on education is not the answer to lifting standards”. He said something that ought to be self-evident:
Adequate school funding is essential. But money alone is not the answer; we have increased spending on schools and still seen standards decline. We urgently require a national action plan to target resources on proven, interconnected strategies for arresting the drift in our schools (emphasis added).
In the report Five challenges in Australian school education, Masters says one of the key challenges :
….is to reduce current disparities in the schooling experiences of students in Australia’s most and least advantaged schools. The general challenge is to ensure that all students receive a high-quality education regardless of where they happen to live or the school that they happen to attend.
Sounds straight out of the Gonski playbook to me and addressing all five challenges would require significant additional spending on education (or redistributing current spending – see below). Masters goes on to say:
It might be concluded from this observation that better funding is not the answer to better educational outcomes. However, a number of other countries have succeeded in raising the performances of their schools at the same time as performances in Australia have declined. This suggests that whether or not increased funding makes a difference depends on how it is applied. Our national challenge is to maximise the impact of government expenditure by targeting it on evidence-based strategies to improve performances in Australian schools (emphasis added).
The Australian opines that what is required is better application of existing government funding based on evidence-based strategies (although it does approve of Labor’s proposal to spend $400 million to improve the teaching of STEM subjects).
Well, if that’s the case, the starting point has got to be redistributing the substantial amounts of government funding going to Australia’s wealthiest schools (“class warfare” as The Australian would depict that).
The Age recently reported, for example, that some of Victoria’s wealthiest private schools have reaped huge government funding increases, while disadvantaged public schools have been hit with cuts. The graph illustrates the bounty reaped by such schools in recent years.
Increase in Government funding for selected elite schools 2009-2013 (%)
Similar story in New South Wales, according to The Sydney Morning Herald:
Twenty of Sydney’s wealthiest private schools received $111 million in taxpayer funding last year, new data has revealed, allowing the institutions to subsidise plans for tennis courts, flyover theatre towers, and Olympic pools with underwater cameras.
The so-called “renovations” at St Catherine’s School alone would funding the building of 3 or 4 good sizedand well equipped government schools (albeit, without lap pools and world class auditoriums). St Catherine’s had a net income in 2014 of about $30 million, including $6 million in Commonwealth and State funding.
The question should not be whether we can afford to invest more in education but whether we can afford to. As observed in the OECD’s report, “when the potential gains are compared to total spending on education…arguments against school improvement based on limited funds are indeed shortsighted.”
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Private schools “arms race”
Posted at 6:49 pm
Jun 27thFairfax Media | 26 June 2016
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Private schools are outspending Victorian public schools by four to one, splurging on rowing tanks, pilates studios, sky decks and imaginariums.
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Some top private schools have spent up to $70 million on capital projects over the past few years as part of a facilities “arms race” to lure students.
The state’s biggest spender, Carey Baptist Grammar School, shelled out about $11.4 million in 2014 on a new “learning and innovation” centre at its Kew campus.
The $23 million building features an “audiovisual Imaginarium” with 3D technology and a “United Nations Room” with a sky deck with sweeping views the city.
Principal Philip Grutzner said the centre had replaced 1950s classrooms that were “as bad as some of the worst facilities I’ve seen in many independent and state schools”.
He said all Victorian students deserved quality teachers and “welcoming, supportive and innovative” facilities had a major impact on morale and learning.
An analysis of the most recent My School data by the Centre for Policy Development’s Bernie Shepherd and Chris Bonnor revealed the capital expenditure per Victorian private school student was $2011 in 2014. This is compared to $469 per state school student.
Shepherd said government funding for capital works should not be provided to well-off private schools.
Where there are large amounts being spent already, more money does not make much difference to educational outcomes.
The evidence shows that funding disadvantaged schools and students leads to greater educational outcomes.
The analysis showed the federal government spent $141 on capital expenditure per private school student, compared to $238 for public school students. The state government also spent $184 per state school student.
It follows a recent analysis showing the average government funding of some of Victoria’s most elite private schools increased eight times times the rate of the neediest public schools.
Meanwhile, the current federal has refused to commit to Gonski funding.
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The Scan # 178 12 April 2016
Posted at 12:03 pm
Apr 12thTAFE does heavy lifting – TDA
12 April 2016 | A TAFE Directors Australia (TDA)-commissioned analysis of official data reveals ‘for
profit’ private training colleges have gained a massive 75% share of the $3 billion Commonwealth VET FEE-HELP funding, while the public TAFE sector continues to do the “heavy lifting”. The performance of Australia’s 57 TAFE Institutes emerges strongly, dominating all major state and territory VET-funded ‘fields of education’ and trade apprenticeships. While TAFE delivered 63% of enrolments across the majority of fields of education, Commonwealth allocation of student loans to TAFE fell to just 20% in 2014, and the government’s own emergency legislation to halt private college rorts has worsened this reduction in funding for TAFE students….[ READ MORE ]….Inquiry into uni admissions
7 April 2016 | The minister for education and training Simon Birmingham has tasked the Higher Education Standards Panel (HESP) to canvass options to improve information about the accessibility and comparability of course entry pathways and to ensure students are ‘uni ready’. He said students need a clear understanding of what they need to get into their course of choice and what will be expected of them through their further study, while universities need to be held to account – and that appears presently not to be the case. The review will be guided by “10 key principles” ….[ READ MORE ]….The HECS bomb
7 April 2016 | As the Turnbull government ponders a higher education policy to take to the 2016
election, it’s been given food for thought by a research report revealing explosive growth of 560% in FEE-HELP debt over the next decade – on current policy settings. Obviously this portends a change to current policy settings. The independent Parliamentary Budget Office report finds that the loans scheme will cost the budget $11.1 billion by 2025-26, up from $1.7 billion currently. This amount covers the scheme’s concessional interest rates and the increasing proportion of loans that will never be repaid. It projects the total nominal value of student loans program (the cumulative value of the portfolio) will grow from around $60 billion now to $185 billion by 2026. The PBO attributes the uncapping of university places over the period 2010- 2012 and the expansion of loans to vocational students as driving growth in FEE-HELP debt since 2010. Implementation of the government’s stalled reform package would accelerate the growth of debt…[ READ MORE ]…Funding cuts still on the table
7 April 2016 | The government remains committed to a higher education funding reform with university students increasingly likely to pay more for their degrees, Education Minister Simon Birmingham has confirmed. Birmingham told Sky News on 4 April he wanted to “refine and improve” the original plan by former minister Christopher Pyne, saying “the growth in higher education spending over the last 20 years has essentially gone at double the rate of growth of the economy, so that is not a sustainable financial trajectory”. He said the original 20% cut had only ever been “deferred” for 12 months….[ READ MORE ]….Reforms have eroded TAFE system
5 April 2016 | A report presented to the Council of Australian Governments on 1 April has found that
critical community and educational elements of TAFE have been eroded. The review of the National Partnership Agreement on Skills Reform (NPA) was undertaken by ACIL Allan Consulting last December. It reveals the extent to which so-called competition and efficiency reforms, which fail to recognise that TAFE is more than “just another provider”, have been pursued at the expense of downgrading TAFE. It says transformation of the public provider role requires a steady, evolutionary process, otherwise there are strong risks of losing the value invested in the current capacity and capability of public provision. ….[ READ MORE ]…
Handwriting makes a comeback, outperforming laptops in memory retention
9 April 2016 | US studies have found that students who took handwritten notes outperformed those who used a computer or laptop, grasping new ideas more readily and retaining information for longer.
The HECS hoax, and its most remarkable feature
9 April 2016 | If you want to make the FEE-HELP system work, cut the threshold, make it attractive to pay upfront, give a discount and start again.
Deakin’s promise of a university in the bush is in danger of turning to ashes
9 April 2016 | It is becoming clear that Warrnambool in south-west Victoria, like many other country areas, the brave promise of the past – that educational opportunities should be available to all, and that country students should not be compelled to move to the city – is in danger of turning to ashes.
Higher education fees, how did we get to this?
9 April 2016 | How much to charge students, when to apply the debt and all manner of detail over how a higher education loans scheme should work has long been fodder for heated political debate.
Incentives matter: witness our dysfunctional higher education system
8 April 2016 | It’s highly possible generous subsidies have underpinned bureaucratic bloat within universities and encouraged too many people into university study, with the unfortunate side-effect of diminishing the quality and reputation of degrees.
Major cuts to education spending loom in May budget following shock student loans blowout
6 April 2016 | Major cuts to education spending are set to be a centrepiece of the May budget, as a new bombshell report finds the annual cost of the program used by Australians to attend university will blow out by a staggering 560% in a decade.
Budget should give universities more flexibility on student contributions
4 April 2016 | A greater student contribution makes sense on grounds of equity, good resource allocation and quality of education.
Impact of 20% Cut to Funding per Government Supported Student
5 April 2016 | While the government might think dumping its policy to fully deregulate fees will take the prospect of $100,000 degrees off the table, analysis shows that a policy based on 20% cut to government funding and increasing the cap on student contributions to compensate for that cut puts $90,000 degrees fairly and squarely on that table.
Click image to go to the Election Page
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An election can’t come soon enough for Turnbull
8 April 2016
Malcolm Turnbull has struggled to put together a winning week all year, and now the polls have turned against him. The pressure this puts on an election-year budget is excruciating, writes Barrie Cassidy in The Drum.
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More troubling now for the Government, however, is that the issues are starting to work against them.
Take education. The government went flat out this week putting that issue front and centre, an issue that historically favours Labor.
The minister, Simon Birmingham, is articulating the problem effectively enough. He points out that the budget deficit is $36 billion and against that background, the cost of higher education since 2009 has grown by about 59% – while the economy has grown at just 29%.
But the solutions will be much harder to sell, and they will have to be sold in a budget that is now critical to the Government’s re-election.
To rein in the ballooning costs of HECS loans, the Government is looking at wiping them out in the vocational training sector; making university entry harder; and clawing back the loans at a faster rate. None of that, however you argue the principle, will be popular.
Click image to go to summary
How generous is Australia’s FEE-HELP scheme?
11 April 2016
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With debate growing over burgeoning FEE-HELP debt, education minister Simon Birmingham has asserted that Australia runs one of the most generous student loan schemes in the world. Overall, this is true, with three key features: the relatively high income threshold before repayments kick in; the zero real interest rate; and relatively low repayment rates. However, while the income threshold is much lower than in England and New Zealand, for example, FEE-HELP repayments are calculated on a debtor’s entire income, while in other countries repayments are based on income above the threshold. And New Zealand charges no interest at all for NZ domiciles. It’s also the case that, as generous as FEE-HELP may be, a number of OECD countries charge no fees at all, obviating the need for loans. This Fact Check is by Ittima Cherstidham of the Grattan Institute.
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Overall, it is true that many features of Australia’s loan schemes for tuition fees make it more generous than most other countries that charge for higher education. But from a student’s perspective, how generous Australia is depends on exactly which aspect of the loan scheme you’re looking at.
This FactCheck will examine how Australia compares to other countries when it comes to:
- the two key types of student loan schemes on offer here and overseas;
- how generous Australia’s scheme is compared to countries with similar schemes;
- how much you have to earn in different countries before loan repayments start;
- how much different governments internationally subsidise the cost of higher education;
- the interest rates charged on student loans;
- and finally whether there are any countries where students don’t need a loan to get a degree.
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Exponential growth of VET-FEE HELP as sector opened to private colleges
The looting of VET FEE-HELP
7 April 2016
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A report presented on ABC Radio National provides an insight into the thinking of the providers who have virtually looted VET FEE-HELP: it was all within the rules, apparently, so that made it all right. As this extract shows, the greater part of the loot flowed to a handful of providers, all of which were relatively recently established, with no track record of provision, let alone quality provision. In the space of a couple of years, for example, Ivan Brown, turned a $500 start-up investment into a stake in a listed company worth $180 million (Australian Careers Network), all built on the back of government training subsidiesThe whole report is worth reading – ‘I’m not a cowboy’: Phoenix Institute investor maintains private college did nothing wrong.
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Outflows under the VET FEE-HELP scheme have grown exponentially in recent years, particularly after
2012 when the Gillard government struck new national partnership agreements with the states and territories that set ambitious targets for growth in vocational qualifications and tied funding to the opening up of the training industry to private competition.When it was opened up in 2009, the scheme lent out $26 million, which grew to $118 million in 2010, $205 million in 2011, $325 million in 2012 and $699 million in 2013. Over the first five years of the scheme inclusive, coinciding roughly with the term of the former Labor government, the VET FEE-HELP loans totalled $1.4 billion.
Under the Coalition, VET FEE-HELP loans leapt to $1.8 billion in 2014 and a staggering $3 billion in 2015.
To subscribe to The Scan….
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Tiny houses
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A tour of Fred and Shannon Schultz’s amazing off the grid tiny house on wheels in Victoria, Australia. Fred spent 3 years designing the house in SketchUp and another year building it, mostly by himself and with little experience. It’s not for everyone, obviously, but it’s one way to address housing affordability, not to mention sustainability.
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See
Fred’s Tiny Houses
The VET Store
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The VET Store is a service by the VET Development Centre which provides access to a range of information to support VET practitioners in the work they do.
Click image to find out more!
Click to listen
Adult contemporary music
The Fray…London Grammar…Leonard Cohen…Dixie Chicks…Peter Gabriel…Of Monsters and Men…Krishna Das…Cold Play…Snow Patrol….
Aretha Franklin You do need to sign up to listen but it’s free (for the first 40 hours a month)
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Is there something interesting near where you live and/or work? Got an interesting story? Got an event coming up? Tell us about it!
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The Scan # 177 17 March 2016
Posted at 12:55 pm
Mar 17th
News
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Fed takeover of VET unlikely
14 March 2016 | The newly-minted Commonwealth minister for skills, Scott Ryan, has poured cold water on a proposed Commonwealth takeover of vocational education and training set out in a draft of a paper to go to the next meeting of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). Under the proposal, TAFE fees would be deregulated and TAFEs would receive the same funding. While education Simon Birmingham has strongly advocated a Commonwealth takeover, Ryan says there are strong arguments to maintain the current system. Ryan said redesigning the troubled VET FEE-HELP scheme – which has blown out in costs and led to the targeting of vulnerable and disadvantaged students – is his top priority. He stressed he did not want to punish private providers offering high quality courses and that the sector has to be flexible enough to respond to changing economic needs…[ READ MORE ]…
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Deakin doesn’t see a future at Warrnambool
14 March 2016 | Deakin University is considering withdrawing from its Warrnambool campus, about 250km south-west of Melbourne, amid a steep decline in student numbers, from 1,342 students in 2011 to a forecast 872 students this year. Deakin vice-chancellor Professor Jane den Hollander said the university hopes to maintain the campus, but that “all options” are on the table. den Hollander made it pretty clear that the preferred option is another provider taking over the campus but if that can’t be negotiated then closing the campus is a real option. She said there is a growing gap between what Deakin offers and the “particular needs of the region’s students, businesses and the broader community” which is mostly at certificate and diploma leve). While Deakin doesn’t itself offer sub-degree programs, it does have partnerships with other providers. In particular Deakin College, formerly MBIT, provides a Certificate IV in Tertiary Preparation and a range of diploma programs on the three other Deakin campuses (Burwood, Geelong Waterfront and Waurn Ponds), which provide pathways to Deakin degree programs…[ READ MORE ]….
Monash to exit Berwick
8 March 2016 | Monash University says it will close its Berwick campus in Melbourne’s outer south-east unless it can partner with another university on the site. The university said it will stop teaching at Berwick by the end of 2018 after a deal with Victoria University (VU) to use the campus fell through. Monash University vice-chancellor Professor Margaret Gardner said enrolments at the campus had been consistently low, making it difficult to provide a “full student experience”. She said demand for higher education in the south-east has not grown to the extent it was once anticipated, with many local students tending to go past the local campus in preference for other campuses. There only three faculties on the campus — business, education, nursing — and enrolments are low, with only 1,600. Just 300 new students enrolled at the campus in 2016. Monash has 67,000 students overall, with almost 30,000 at Clayton and more than 20,000 at Caulfield and 3,800 students at its Peninsula campus…[ READ MORE ]…
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Labor spokesperson Sharon Bird
Labor promises national VET review
16 March 2016 | Labor will launch a comprehensive review of the vocational education and training sector – equivalent to the landmark Gonski Review into school funding and the Bradley Review of higher education – if it wins office at the next election. The review would be the first such inquiry into the VET sector since the Kangan Report in 1974, which actually coined the term TAFE. Labor has also promised a National Priority Plan for TAFE and proposes to cap tuition fees for the VET sector, establish a new ombudsman for the sector and halve the lifetime limit for VET FEE-HELP loans…[ READ MORE ]….
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Collaboration and the case for certainty
University Australia’s election agenda
17 March 2016
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In this extract from his speech to the recent Universities Australia Conference (which was mainly about research, innovation and collaboration), Universities Australia’s chair Barney Glover sets out in broad terms the university sector’s policy agenda for this election year. He prefaced his comments with the observation that the sector has been subject almost 2 years of policy insecurity and uncertainty which has taken a toll on the ability of universities to plan and allocate resources (it’s actually more like 4 years, taking into account the churn that was going on in the latter days of the Gillard government). In October last year, Universities Australia released its policy statement – Keep it clever 2016. This sets out in detail the context of its policy agenda (“universities are really important to the nation’s present and future security and well being”); what’s needed to drive research and innovation; public funding support for students; and government support for international education.
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Policy reform
Reform is difficult at the best of times and is made more difficult when grand reform ideas are quickly taken off the table, the risk being the
eradication of anything remotely catalytic.It’s vitally important that we establish a tone that speaks to the possibilities of reform rather than the limits of party-political paradigms.
This is especially relevant in this election year but more so in light of the considerable challenges Australia’s universities face in the decades to come.
In a setting where reform is approached with such reductionist cynicism; just what is it we are missing?
I would argue we are missing the chance to do the very thing, as a nation, I demonstrated we can be so good at in my earlier remarks on research collaboration.
That is, we are missing the opportunity to grow, develop and excel through a cognisant, progressive and collaborative approach to reform.
It would be remiss of me to reflect so pointedly on the dynamics of Australian political reform without addressing higher education reform. In many respects this issue has been subject to the many pressures I’ve discussed.
Without traversing the policy and political landscape since the announcement of the government’s higher education reform package in 2014, it is important to note, that despite the Senate’s opposition, the reforms in their original form continue to be government policy as reflected in financial and budget papers.
With Senate reform looming, these are far from “dead in the water” – as some have suggested.
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Plan B
Collapsed training college owners paid themselves $20 million
14 March 2016
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The ABC’s 7.30 Report has reported that the owners of a major training college that collapsed after the Government cracked down on ‘study now, pay later’ loans appear to have had a long-term plan to cut and run from the sector.
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Global Intellectual Holding, which owned a number of providers, including Keystone College and Aspire, was a vocational education giant and its demise has particularly hit students in one of Victoria’s most disadvantaged regions.
Former Keystone student Liz Jolley has been a disability pensioner for 30 years and was signed up to a $22,000 Diploma of Interactive Digital Media, which as she admits was clearly beyond her.
She was recruited by Jacob Di Battista, who worked for National Training and Development, the marketing arm of Global Holdings. He trawled the streets of Broadmeadows, outside Centrelink and public housing, targeting everyone, including the homeless. He told 7.30:
Whether you’re in a wheelchair, scooter, blind, disabled, don’t really care. You’re a target.
Click image to go to 7.30 Report
Sitting at the top of Global Holdings were Aloi Burgess and Roger Williams, who’d grown the company into an $80 million enterprise. But then in 2015, the government clamped down on many private college recruiting practices. Having failed to sell the company, last month Burgess and Williams put it into liquidation.
This might have been a disaster for students and staff, but not for Burgess and Williams. The last financial report filed by Global shows they had a Plan B, a trust called The Collective Exit Strategy.
Before Global collapsed, the company lent $4 million to each of the directors personal companies and paid each $6 million in dividends.
While the liquidator reported apparent breaches of directors’ duties to the corporate regulator, Burgess and Williams are nowhere to be found.
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Comment & analysis
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The Year to date
Plus ça change
11 March 2016
There’s a lot to catch up with but, as they say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (which is, according to the estimable Wiktionary, an epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”), meaning “the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”)
As previously reported, changes to the VET FEE-HELP (VFH) scheme legislated late last year provides some better protection of students from the carpetbaggers who have looted the scheme and dudded the students. The government proposes to spend this year look at ways to rort-proof it from the likes of Phoenix. But as so many people have asked: how did it get to this?
Part of the answer is a near pathological obsession by governments – of all stripes – with “deregulation” and “marketisation”. As former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chair observed last year, “…..this huge waste of government money is the “inevitable consequence” of governments funding the private sector to deliver a public good. From the home insulation debacle to export market development grants, film industry tax incentives, health and education subsidies, Samuel says the same thing has been happening “as long as I’ve been alive”:
Business is much, much smarter than governments, and business knows how to exploit and you can’t deal with that using people sitting in Canberra or Spring Street. The rogues – and they’ll be there in any industry – they say with glee, all the way to the bank, ‘Come in spinner’!”
This is not to argue against competition and a role for private providers but you have to have, among other things, a robust regulatory system. Quite evidently, this has not been the case.
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The state of VET in Australia
A fractured system
16 March 2016
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In a policy paper, VET funding in Australia: Background trends and future directions, Peter Noonan from Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute says the low priority traditionally accorded the vocational sector has been exacerbated in recent years by wild inconsistencies between states on what they funded and for how much, ad hoc federal funding programs, rorting and distortions caused by VET FEE-HELP and the relentless push to reduce costs for both levels of government.
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While there are 200,000 more VET enrolments than there were 10 years ago, enrolments have been trending downwards since 2012.
This compares to higher education enrolments which have risen 43% over the same period and which continue to rise. Given the full implementation of the demand driven system in 2012, which enables universities to enrol as many students as they choose, there’s an obvious causal link there, which has particularly hit TAFE enrolments (a double whammy for TAFE, given aggressive growth in the private VET sector).
The paper notes that the Bradley Review (of which Noonan was a member) identified the risk
…that some states and territories face major fiscal constraints, which may lead them to reduce their investment in VET in the near future, leading to skewed and uneven investment between the sectors over time if a demand-based funding model is adopted for higher education.
The Bradley Review further argued that:
moving to a demand-based approach to funding higher education cannot be done in isolation from VET. Changing higher education funding but leaving VET funding untouched would compound existing distortions.
Which is exactly what seems to have happened.
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The case for a national VET review
16 March 2016
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Following is an extract from a submission by the LH Martin Institute to the House of Representatives Inquiry into TAFE (May 2013) which argues the need for a comprehensive national inquiry into VET.
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…policy-makers, in particular, but also industry, the VET provider sector and analysts need to be mindful of the sometimes enervating effect of constant changes to and attempts to remake the VET system. A restless, seemingly ceaseless search for perfection seems to characterise the official mindset about the VET sector. At any one time, it is almost certainly likely to be that one or other or several of Australia’s nine government jurisdictions will be inquiring into VET and or have in train a process of “skills reform”.
The sector would undoubtedly benefit from a period of stability, certainty and consolidation.
That stated, it is, of course, a requirement that policy settings and system architecture including funding arrangements be understood to be and broadly accepted to be “about right”. Whether such a condition of broad consensus is achievable appears moot: it has, evidently, proved beyond achievement for a decade or more.
LH Martin Institute has stated the case for a broad overarching, root and branch review of VET, as has occurred in recent years in higher education (the Bradly Review) and schools education (the Gonski Review). It’s well past time: such a fundamental review has not occurred since the Kangan Committee in 1973/74.
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Life & stuff
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14 March 2016
Oh Canada….
Elegy for a lost child
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On 2 September last year Turkish police found the body of a 3-year-old Syrian refugee – Aylan Kurdi – who had drowned, together with his 5-year-old brother Ghalib and mother Rehan, in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to escape Syria and eventually make their way to Canada. The harrowing images of the toddler’s lifeless body went viral, driving home the danger and desperation of the refugee crisis in Syria and inspiring a powerful emotional response from artists around the world. Australian singer/songwriter Missy Higgins, who’d recently become a mum herself, penned and recorded this poignant elegy. All proceeds from the sales of this recording are going to the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre. Missy Higgins is currently touring – check here for places and dates.
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Two footnotes:
- Canada’s response to the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Syria and flowing into Europe has been to take 20,000 Syrian refugees since September. Australia has promised to resettle 12,000 but has so far managed to only “process” a handful of the refugees.
- Two Syrian men have each been sentenced to more than four years jail for people smuggling in relation to the drownings.
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Noticeboard
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The VET Store
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The VET Store is a service by the VET Development Centre which provides access to a range of information to support VET practitioners in the work they do.
Click image to find out more!
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Click to listen
Radio Double Karma on Pandora
Adult contemporary music
The Fray…London Grammar…Leonard Cohen…Dixie Chicks…Peter Gabriel…Of Monsters and Men…Krishna Das…Cold Play…Snow Patrol….
Aretha Franklin You do need to sign up to listen but it’s free (for the first 40 hours a month)
___________________________________
Is there something interesting near where you live and/or work? Got an interesting story? Got an event coming up? Tell us about it!
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Collaboration and the case for certainty
Posted at 9:06 am
Mar 17thUniversity Australia’s election agenda
17 March 2016
………………………………………………………………………………………………………
In this extract from his speech to the recent Universities Australia Conference (which was mainly about research, innovation and collaboration), Universities Australia’s chair Barney Glover sets out in broad terms the university sector’s policy agenda for this election year. He prefaced his comments with the observation that the sector has been subject almost 2 years of policy insecurity and uncertainty which has taken a toll on the ability of universities to plan and allocate resources (it’s actually more like 4 years, taking into account the churn that was going on in the latter days of the Gillard government). In October last year, Universities Australia released its policy statement – Keep it clever 2016. This sets out in detail the context of its policy agenda (“universities are really important to the nation’s present and future security and well being”); what’s needed to drive research and innovation; public funding support for students; and government support for international education.
………………………………………………………………………………………….……
Policy reform
Reform is difficult at the best of times and is made more difficult when grand reform ideas are quickly taken off the table, the risk being the
eradication of anything remotely catalytic.It’s vitally important that we establish a tone that speaks to the possibilities of reform rather than the limits of party-political paradigms.
This is especially relevant in this election year but more so in light of the considerable challenges Australia’s universities face in the decades to come.
In a setting where reform is approached with such reductionist cynicism; just what is it we are missing?
I would argue we are missing the chance to do the very thing, as a nation, I demonstrated we can be so good at in my earlier remarks on research collaboration.
That is, we are missing the opportunity to grow, develop and excel through a cognisant, progressive and collaborative approach to reform.
It would be remiss of me to reflect so pointedly on the dynamics of Australian political reform without addressing higher education reform. In many respects this issue has been subject to the many pressures I’ve discussed.
Without traversing the policy and political landscape since the announcement of the government’s higher education reform package in 2014, it is important to note, that despite the Senate’s opposition, the reforms in their original form continue to be government policy as reflected in financial and budget papers.
With Senate reform looming, these are far from “dead in the water” – as some have suggested.
The way forward for higher education
What we don’t yet know, is whether these will continue to be the government’s position in the lead up to the election. And here it is worth reiterating that Universities Australia had suggested a number of amendments to these proposals.
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The sector will never accept that maintaining the level of quality expected by our students, employers and the community can be achieved through reducing the level public investment in universities.
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Nor is it consistent with the government’s stated aim of having innovation at the heart of a strong economy.
Almost two years of policy insecurity and uncertainty is taking its toll on the ability of universities to plan and allocate resources in their student’s best interests.
It is difficult to imagine any other industry tolerating such policy instability.
Yet when it comes to higher education – the majority contributor to Australia’s third largest export industry, the cornerstone of Australia’s innovation future, and a $140 billion contributor to our economy in 2014 – the rules are different.
It remains the case that policy and funding certainty and stability continues to be the sector’s number one advocacy priority.
The opposition has released a comprehensive higher education policy but questions remain – not least around base funding and the means for sustaining the system over the longer term.
In recognising the issue, education minister Simon Birmingham has broadly consulted with stakeholders as he considers options for change.
We encourage the government, and again I don’t think it unreasonable, to make its position clear – sooner, rather than later.
The time has come for a national agreement on the future of higher education in this country.
We have strong views, we have our own ideas, we have invested a great deal in the research and analysis that informs those ideas and we have strived to posit a way forward but we do not pretend to have all the answers.
It is no secret that while there is a great deal on which vice-chancellors are in substantial and unwavering agreement, there are matters of continuing debate among us.
However, the most important debate on higher education in this election year is not the one within the university sector but the public debate: the engagement our political leaders have with the Australian people.
Universities Australia, like all of us, wants that debate to be open and informed.
We believe a public debate that reflects the complexity of these issues is critical and it should be one in which the respective parties clearly articulate the following:
- the principles that guide and the objectives to be achieved by their higher education policies;
- the key reforms that will deliver those objectives;
- the proposed means for delivering a sustainable and stable higher education system; and
- the implications of these policies for students, universities, industry and indeed government itself over the longer term.
So with an election in the offing, I take this opportunity on behalf of Universities Australia to urge both parties to engage in a sophisticated public debate and purposeful discussion on the higher education, research and indeed, innovation challenges we face today and in decades to come.
The discovery of gravitational waves and the enormous possibilities of the SKA not only inspire us, but remind us of just what can be achieved when universities, researchers, industry and governments share their knowledge, combine their experience, and apply their expertise to an agreed end.
It reminds us that innovation not only requires deep and sustained collaboration between and beyond universities but patient and serious investment. It reminds us that we should dare to imagine what might lie beyond what we know today.
If we are as a nation serious about our intellectual development, about research and innovation, about a new economy fuelled by ideas then we need to think about education as an essential government responsibility requiring high levels of sustained investment over the long term.
We need to think about education as we think about the economy: the means for personal security and national prosperity.
We need to think about education in the way we think about the arts: as food for the soul and as the expression of who we are as individuals and as a society.
That is why this debate matters.
The time really has come for a national agreement on the future of higher education.
Click image to go to statement
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The year to date
Posted at 4:14 pm
Mar 11th11 March 2016
There’s a lot to catch up with but, as they say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (which is, according to the estimable Wiktionary, an epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”), meaning “the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”)
VET FEE-HELP
As previously reported, changes to the VET FEE-HELP (VFH) scheme legislated late last year provides some better protection of students from the carpetbaggers who have looted the scheme and dudded the students. The government proposes to spend this year look at ways to rort-proof it from the likes of Phoenix. But as so many people have asked: how did it get to this?
Part of the answer is a near pathological obsession by governments – of all stripes – with
“deregulation” and “marketisation”. As former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chair observed last year, “…..this huge waste of government money is the “inevitable consequence” of governments funding the private sector to deliver a public good. From the home insulation debacle to export market development grants, film industry tax incentives, health and education subsidies, Samuel says the same thing has been happening “as long as I’ve been alive”:Business is much, much smarter than governments, and business knows how to exploit and you can’t deal with that using people sitting in Canberra or Spring Street. The rogues – and they’ll be there in any industry – they say with glee, all the way to the bank, ‘Come in spinner’!”
This is not to argue against competition and a role for private providers but you have to have, among other things, a robust regulatory system. Quite evidently, this has not been the case.
In a discussion paper released in January, the Commonwealth department more or less conceded that ASQA has been a paper tiger:
Under its legislation, ASQA has a broad power to cancel qualifications where it is satisfied of certain matters, including where it is satisfied that a RTO did not provide the assessment necessary for a student to demonstrate they have achieved the relevant learning outcomes…..To date, ASQA and its predecessor VET regulators have not implemented the wholesale cancellation of qualifications as part of their regulatory approaches. In the four years since its establishment, ASQA has exercised this power sparingly, involving approximately seven RTOs (or former RTOs), 350 individuals, 250 qualifications and 225 statements of attainment.
ASQA has broad powers generally but has been timid in exercising them, seemingly because of the costs. The same discussion paper notes:
A series of civil penalty provisions is set out in the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act 2011 (NVETR). Where one of these is breached, ASQA make seek a civil penalty order through the courts. This is likely the strongest of the enforcement options available to ASQA.
The relative failure of ASQA to rein in rorters may have spared its budget but has led to massive costs for the public purse and for individuals. It’s been left to the ACCC to take on the rorters (see).
And it seems that there’s been a fair dollop of administrative incompetence, as well. A recent ABC Background Briefing revealed a “communication breakdown”, whereby the Commonwealth education department did not share VFH data with ASQA until early 2015. Such data might have allowed ASQA to judge which training organisations were growing fastest and therefore posed a high regulatory risk. ASQA has strongly refuted that there was a breakdown of any consequence and points out that, “following liaison with DET”, it launched a targeted program of 21 audits of training providers approved to offer courses under VET FEE-HELP. Three RTOs were assessed as being critically non-compliant with the requirements of the VET Quality Framework at the conclusion of the audit process and, following a ‘show cause’ process, had their registrations cancelled. These RTOs were:
- Unique International College
- Cornerstone (Empower)
- Australian Institute of Professional Education.
In addition, ASQA has cancelled the registration of the Phoenix Institute.
Each of these for four “providers” have been hauled by the ACCC into the Federal Court, along with Acquire Learning, which is an education broker, for among other things, allegedly making “false and misleading statements and engaging in “unconscionable conduct”. The ACCC is seeking recovery of VFH payments and cancellation of VFH student debts. Just to give you the flavour of this, in 2014 Cornerstone’s Empower Institute enrolled 5,000 students, charging them about $15,000 for an online business diploma course. It received $46 million in VET FEE-HELP payments and graduated just 5 students: that’s right, nearly $10 million a pop!
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Education scandal: ACCC hits Phoenix Institute for false, misleading, unconscionable conduct
Unique International College: Amarjit Khela to appeal against accreditation cancellation
ACCC takes action against Sydney college over allegedly forged signatures
Training college Australian Institute of Professional Education has licence revoked by regulator
From policeman to Young Rich Lister: how Ivan Brown found a gap in the private training market
Vocational students may pay as Phoenix Institute takes government to court
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Separate to this, the Aspire group of colleges – Aspire College of Education, The Design Works College of Design, the Australian Indigenous College and the affiliated RTO Services Group and National Training and Development – collapsed in mid-February, affecting thousands of students. With 20 campuses across Australia, the group had $83 million in revenue in 2014-2015 – mostly through VET FEE-HELP payments. Fairfax Media reported that the group had been recently audited by ASQA and found to be compliant.
VET funding
A sustainable and realistic funding model is another prerequisite of an effective VET system. In real terms, VET funding has been declining for years. According to the Productivity Commission’s Report on Government Services, that trend continues: recurrent funding for the VET sector by Commonwealth, state and territory governments totalled $5.2 billion in 2014, a 12 % cut from 2013.VET assessment
The discussion paper referred to above, in the context of ASQA’s performance, is actually about improving VET assessment practices which I don’t think is a particular issue at this stage. As I told The Australian, and we’ll leave it at that:
Brendan Sheehan said any moves to limit the reputational damage caused to the VET sector by rorting private colleges was welcome, but (he) doubted changing rules around assessment would have any real impact. He said strong policing of the sector and rule changes to ensure dodgy colleges repay government subsidies and VET FEE-HELP advances, such as was now happening in Victoria, would have a much more direct and permanent impact.
The paper suggests that having specialist trainers and teachers who require a diploma to do assessments would have a positive impact. But the real problems lie with online training and companies that have ripped billions out of VET FEE-HELP. I’m not sure if the overall quality of assessment is the actual big issue. Sure, it’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story.
Assessment is hardly the problem when you’ve got outfits like Empower getting just 0.125% of their enrolled students to completion of their courses.
The national market
The drive to create an effective and efficient national training market, enthusiastically embraced by the former Gillard Commonwealth government, spurred on by the innovative approach of the former Victorian Brumby government, has been less than successful (see everything above). A series of NCVER papers shows that what we’ve ended up with is a “hotchpotch of eligibility rules, fees ,subsidies course lists and contract settings”:
Kaye Bowman, first author of all four papers said the differences fly in the face of two decades of reform aimed at building a nationally co-ordinated training system. And they jeopardised course quality, TAFE sustainability and the supply of key skills. Dr Bowman said the entitlement, which guaranteed Australians training at certificate III level, had started out as a narrowly focused equity measure for young people but was extended to older people, retrenched workers and career changers, with every jurisdiction crafting the scheme differently.
Skills Service Organisations
The government has announced the outcome of a process to select Skills Service Organisations to support Industry Reference Committees, as part of revised arrangements to develop and review training packages
Appointments
Leanne Cover, formerly a senior executive in the ACT department of education, has been appointed as CEO of the Canberra Institute of Technology.
Trevor Schwenke, formerly general manager of TAFE Queensland South West, has been appointed CEO of Bendigo Kangan Institute.
The annual ATAR hullaballoo
In January, we had the now annual hullaballoo over the efficacy or otherwise of ATARs as some standard for gaining admission to a university, sparked this year by the decision of some Victorian universities not to publish “clearly in” ATARS for three-quarters of course offers (the point at which a student with a certain will definitely get an offer for course – and may get an with a lesser ATAR anyway). Victoria University’s vice-chancellor Peter Dawkins “boldly stated that ATAR cut-off scores are very often a meaningless piece of information”. Backing him up was Swinburne University’s vice-chancellor Linda Kristjanson, who is also chair of the Victorian Vice-Chancellors Committee.
We really are in a post-ATAR stage. The ATAR is a very blunt and imperfect instrument.
Under a proposed new model, students at Templestowe College will be given the option of applying for any course at Swinburne University without an ATAR. Entry into the university’s courses – which will include the full gamut of undergraduate degrees – will be based on new measures of student ability: grit, leadership and strong inter-personal skills.The fact is that that in the demand driven system, where universities will receive funding for every student they enroll, the ATAR is of decreasing direct relevance, though not altogether irrelevant, as a selection tool. The growth in participation in higher education sparks a rather pointless controversy over declining “entry standards”, typified this year by a breathless bit of analysis in the Sydney Morning Herald – NSW universities taking students with ATARs as low as 30.
But as The Scan observed way back in January 2013, why it should come as a surprise to any ATARs for university admission have on average declined in recent years is itself a surprise. The whole point of the reforms arising out of the Bradley Review process in 2008 was is to
- increase higher education attainment in the general population
- increase higher participation by poorly represented population groups (low SES, regional, indigenous).
To the extent that you achieve one goal, all things being equal (for example, #2 isn’t achieved at the expense of some other group) you also achieve the other. And the overall effect must be that, “on average”, a lower ATAR than had hitherto been necessary (or no ATAR at all) will get some more applicants into a university course than had previously been the case (though not into any university course at any university).
That is, the policy, seemingly, is achieving exactly what it is supposed to achieve.
In 2013, just over a third of university offers were based ATAR as the sole determining factor, and it would be somewhat less now, as universities such as Swinburne, and just about every other university (even Go8 universities), move to more broadly based entrance assessment processes. Next year, UNSW Law School, ranked last year one of the best in Australia and 15th best in the world, is introducing a Law Admission Test (you’re still going to need a pretty good ATAR).
A recent article by the Grattan Institute’s Andrew Norton shows that stories such as that run in the Sydney Morning Herald are something of a beat-up: final enrolments of 50 or below ATARs from 2013 school leavers in 2014 were only 3% of the school leaver cohort (although total low-ATAR enrolment is higher than this, due to students who finished school in other years). Norton doesn’t entirely discount the usefulness ATAR and ATAR cut-offs/clearly-ins in giving students insight into their possible options (including vocational education and training).
Review of admission transparency
Nevertheless, Commonwealth education minister Simon Birmingham bought into the debate during his address to the Universities Australia Conference (see below), saying that with rapid growth in enrolments under the demand-driven system over recent years there’s a need ensure the system remains sustainable and uncompromising on quality. He asked why, if there’s no an issue, “why do so many people expend so much annual energy on this (issue)?” On the matter of publishing reliable clearly-in data, it’s a matter of transparency:
Students need to have confidence that they know what the real requirements for admission are; not some artificial measure that bears no resemblance to reality… (current)entry requirements are perhaps as opaque sometimes as a double frosted window.
He’s asked the Higher Education Standards Panel to consider how transparency might be improved.
See also
Should we scrap the ATAR? What are the alternative options? Experts comment
The coming date with electoral destiny
It won’t have escaped your notice that we are careening towards a Federal election. As former ALP factional enforcer Graham Richardson recently observed, on the assumption that Malcom Turnbull is not stupid, then the introduction of the Senate voting reforms must mean a double dissolution on 2 July. On the basis that Turnbull has so peed off most of the crossbench, to leave 6 of the troublesome 7 in place for the next term by not having a double dissolution would indeed be stupid (former Victorian DLP Senator John Madigan term expires, anyway and he will surely go down; SA independent Nick Xenophon supports the reforms).
The unusually long campaign (a 51 day campaign rather than the usual 31 day campaign of modern times) is tricky for the government, assuming the election is the government’s to lose (normally the case for a first term government). There’s plenty of scope for stumbles, stuff ups and scares.
The Budget isn’t too tricky an issue as the government doesn’t actually need to bring down and pass a formal Budget: there wouldn’t be time anyway. What the government needs to do is secure supply to fund the ordinary services of government: a huge swathe of Commonwealth expenditure is covered outside of the supply bills these days anyway, through standing appropriations and special appropriations contained in separate legislation (for example, university funding is provided for under the Higher Education Support Act 2003). Despite the government wanting to fight the election around industrial relations issues, budget issues are going to figure prominently, whenever the election is held, so the government may as well make a virtue out of necessity and use the work it’s being doing on the Budget as its economic policy and release details through the course of the campaign.
Policy directions
I’m not bold enough to predict the winner (although Labor has the harder task ahead of it, there’s no lay down misere in the offing, as seemed the case a few months back), but I’m bold enough to state that when the incoming prime minister meets with PM&C and Treasury officials in the afternoon of 3 July and is handed the Incoming Government Briefing Book (Blue Book for the Coalition, Red Book for Labor), you can be reasonably certain higher education will have a prominent chapter. After all, the $20 billion in savings linked to the original deregulation package, including a 20% cut to course funding, remain in the budget projections. How are the parties going to deal with that issue: the savings are either there or they’re not, and if they’re not there, they just can’t be booked into the future, ad infinitum.
Labor’s announced a largely “steady as she goes” course – notably, no funding cuts, no fee deregulation. Universities Australia is pushing for more detail and more dollars, so we’ll have to see if Labor has anything further to say or promise (we wouldn’t think much in the way of promises these straitened times – perhaps a few vague promises about getting higher education spending to the OECD average “over time”).
As for the Coalition, some reformulation of the failed higher education “reform package” will be in the
Blue Book. In his speech to the Universities Australia Conference Commonwealth education minister Simon Birmingham said the government “continues to believe that some reform is necessary”:Our government continues to believe that some reform is necessary. Reform is necessary to support innovation, both within our universities and beyond. Reform is necessary to support the provision of pathways that enhance equitable access. Reform is necessary to protect our reputation for high quality. And yes, reform is necessary to support federal budget sustainability.
But what actually happens will depend entirely on the composition of the new Senate, which won’t be known until some weeks after the election. If there is a Coalition Senate majority, expect game back on for the packages that failed to pass the Senate in 2014 and 2015. Labor hardheads figure that the combination of a double dissolution and Senate voting reform creates that possibility – but it was, of course, these same hardheads (together with their counterparts in the Coalition and the Greens) who negotiated the preference deals that parachuted the micro-parties into the Senate in the first place. I don’t think you could boldly state anything about the composition of the post-election Senate: who knows what unexpected results the new Senate voting system might throw up, what are the Greens going to do with Senate preferences (while Senate preferencing will be of considerably less value, they won’t want to jeopardise their own balance of power possibilities). And what will Greens voters do – whatever Greens leaders advocate, Greens voters are hardly likely to be inclined to support with their preferences the party that cut the tax, stopped the boats, are stalling on same sex marriage and all the rest.
In his speech to the UA Conference (which was mainly about research, innovation and collaboration), UA chair Barney Glover set out in broad terms the university sector’s policy agenda for this election year. He prefaced his comments with the observation that the sector has been subject almost 2 years of policy insecurity and uncertainty which has taken a toll on the ability of universities to plan and allocate resources (it’s actually more like 4 years, taking into account the churn that was going on in the latter days of the Gillard government). He called on the parties to clearly articulate:- the principles that guide and the objectives to be achieved by their higher education policies;
- the key reforms that will deliver those objectives;
- the proposed means for delivering a sustainable and stable higher education system; and,
- the implications of these policies for students, universities, industry and government itself over the longer term.
In October last year, Universities Australia released its policy statement – Keep it clever 2016. This sets out in detail the context of its policy agenda (“universities are really important to the nation’s present and future security and well being”); what’s needed to drive research and innovation; public funding support for students; and government support for international education.
In his speech to, Glover declared:
The sector will never accept that maintaining the level of quality expected by our students, employers and the community can be achieved through reducing the level public investment in universities.
Well, as represented by UA, reducing public investment in universities was exactly what the sector signed up for in 2014, albeit with some disgruntlement in the ranks. And the Keep it clever document is a little less definitive: the policy is not stated as “never accept” but as:
Universities need government to ensure, in the short-term, that there is no decline in the level of per student funding for government supported student places….
In the short-term is a rather significant qualifying statement. So, it all begins again.
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With Gonski gone, we can expect more demand for private schools
Posted at 2:27 pm
Jan 8thThe government see private schools as the solution to quality
7 January 2016
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The government’s decision to end Gonski education reforms is a huge blow to the sector, writes Richard Teese (Victoria University) in The Conversation. It means funding for Australian schools is not guaranteed beyond 2017, and leaves Australian states in a funding limbo, not knowing where they stand.
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Questions are being asked about where the extra funding will be found. Education minister Simon Birmingham has refused to say whether schools will get the full A$3.8bn in funding initially proposed. We are now looking at a four-year funding period finishing in 2018, rather than the original six-year period.
Birmingham plans to negotiate fresh funding deals with the states from 2018.
The Victorian government has already stated that not funding the last two years of the Gonski deal would take $1bn from the state’s schools.
Between 2009 and 2013, nationwide government funding for private and Catholic schools grew by 23% on a per-student basis, while public funding of government schools grew by just 12.5% over the same period.
In a single year – 2013 – private schools received $2.1 billion in Commonwealth government funding, the equivalent of nearly one third of the final two years of the Gonski funding deal, according to Trevor Cobbold, former productivity commission economist.
Why did the government dump Gonski?
The decision to dump the Gonski funding represents a retreat from two ideas which have been consistently opposed by Coalition governments.
The first is that there should be a minimum level of resource – whether that’s through teaching hours, funding etc – for all children in Australia, regardless of who they are or where they live. State and Territory should not matter nor should postcode nor school.
Where the amount of per student spending is reached through school fees, that reduces the call on public grants because schools are already adequately resourced. Where schools enrol large proportions of disadvantaged students, that lifts the entitlement. More funding is paid per student to help tackle disadvantage through more intensive support.
The second idea relates to the Commonwealth’s role in achieving this resource standard.
Before the 1960s the Coalition resisted funding government schools on the grounds that schools were a matter for the states. It now wants to retire once more behind a wall of federalism, while leaving itself free to fund the private sector.
If the past performance of federal governments – both Labor and Coalition – is any guide, spending on private schools will continue to rise at a much faster rate than spending on public schools.
Impact on states
Denied adequate Commonwealth funding, states now don’t know where they stand, and are likely to retreat from a national resource standard, pleading budgetary pressures.
But for political reasons they will not reduce their funding of private schools. They have a history of keeping the Catholic systems on side and the Catholic bishops have a history of keeping them pliant.
We have seen this with the decision of the Andrews government in 2015 to increase its commitment to private and Catholic schools. This decision was made without regard to the impact it would have on public schools.
Where does this leave Australian education?
The key challenge is reducing the achievement gap between rich and poor, along with all the consequences that flow from this.
Almost all schools that serve predominantly poor families in Australia are public schools. There are very few private or Catholic schools across Australia that enrol mainly children from lowest socio-economic backgrounds. In 2011, public schools educated 80% of all students with disabilities and 80% of all indigenous students.
Since few private schools rank in the lowest fifth band of socio-economic status, the responsibility for raising the achievement of children from poorly-educated, low-income and indigenous families lies largely with the states.
States alone cannot fund the effort required to address achievement differences.
But the Commonwealth can and will outlay more on private schooling for ideological as well as political motives. This will increase social inequality.Reducing support for government schools and lifting support for non-government schools will fuel demand for Catholic and other private schools, as occurred during the Howard years.
With Gonski gone, we are at risk of giving up the great gains in social cohesion which public schooling delivered during the decades of post-war growth.
Richard Teese is Adjunct Professor of Education at Victoria University. 2566
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