Pearls and Irritations

When Nobel economists Joseph Stiglitz recently said that Australia’s future prosperity is tied to us acting to become a “Knowledge Economy” there was subdued muttering of the “Fee Free TAFE” mantra from a few Labor federal parliamentarians. This was followed by multi-party total inaction. Could it be that our federal political leaders, who have been so negligent in allowing our TAFE system to slide into its current overall state of decrepitude, are now too embarrassed to even talk about it?

The “E” in TAFE was intended to stand for “Education”, but the educational focus of TAFE has been long eclipsed by the TAFE system’s adoption of Competency Based Training (CBT). CBT has its origins in training for assembly line workers in the 1950s. It’s a training system premised on the ideas that workers must be closely managed to extract maximum value from their labour and that only designated managers are capable of thinking, evaluating or innovating in the workplace. In my opinion, CBT is now the main barrier to creating a Knowledge Economy in Australia.

In a Knowledge Economy, knowledge is created, questioned, contextualised and communicated between as many people as possible within an industry sector. The knowledge itself is diverse, evolving, dynamic. CBT, by contrast, is a lot to do with maintaining existing workplace hierarchies. In Australia, particularly the white collar/blue collar divide and the “Them vs us” school of industrial relations.

In a Knowledge Economy, learners, with their employers, have choice in deciding what knowledge and skills are most needed in their workplace. With CBT, the industry knowledge and skills have been mostly preordained- set by processes that are remarkably like those of Stalin era Central Planning, but without the Zil limousines marking status for the dignitaries, or the threats of bullets and Siberia to focus their decision making.

The “Knowledge Economy” as suggested by Stiglitz assumes everyone in employment needs to be able to read, write, understand the maths, and confidently explain themselves to others in their industry. These abilities lead to the productivity improvements needed to maintain our living standards.

Earlier this year, we learned that a third of our school kids are falling behind in Maths and English. Earlier still, we learned that some TAFE courses have abysmally low completion rates. How can we work smarter and more productively if so many of us lack adequate literacy, numeracy and spoken English skills needed for work or vocational education? How can Australia do better if its TAFE system is inaccessible, irrelevant or incomprehensible to so many of its citizens?

Fortunately, there is a solution to the problem- All we have to do is rewind our TAFE system a few decades, adjust it to make use of our current level of technology, and relaunch “New TAFE”.

TAFE – Technical And Further Education, before it fell victim to the self-perpetuating administrative idiocies built into “Competency Based Training”, once began planning to incorporate basic skills development into industry specific learning.

Some of Australia’s best adult educators were engaged to devise flexible, innovative learning structures and programs for TAFE. The intent was to create basic skills learning pathways to take almost any person, employed or not, from their current skill level to a brighter future in employment and/or community involvement.

Tragically, simultaneously, TAFE’s “Market Driven Training” experiment was also coming into play. As a result, the assumed federal leadership of TAFE and the resulting sharing between individual TAFEs across Australia simply never happened, Sceptics were assured by market devotees that the magic of markets would produce perfect training results without any tiresome study of actual industry needs.

What did happen was that the commonwealth funding intended for ongoing basic skills development in TAFE was simply syphoned off – captured as billable “Student Contact Hours”, by various species of TAFE business manager and accountant.

In addition, under the banner of State’s Rights, many millions of dollars of TAFE funding, in my opinion, was wasted in often harebrained state and local initiatives requiring later bailouts, artfully rebadged as “special grants”

Together, parochial TAFE greed, and questionable state government TAFE bureaucratic competence, helped to sideline the national goal of lifelong vocational learning for all Australians.

Instead of having diverse programs in place to meet needs of students as they arrive at a TAFE, potential students are now more likely to be assessed via generic Language, Literacy and Numeracy tests with no relation to their job preferences, and then, if they fail to meet level 2 Language, Literacy and Numeracy standards, they will be rejected and urged (without irony) to “Go back to school”.

When the idea that basic skills development should be part of TAFE education was first floated it raised some practical problems – How could viable class sizes be achieved? How could individualised skills development be efficiently monitored? How could a single TAFE institute cater for this level of diversity in student learning needs?

Thirty years on, we now have the cost effective technologies to create a world-leading New TAFE in order to dramatically improve our national productivity.

Most people carry devices capable of voice recognition, text to voice, and accessing virtual classrooms. Software can be readily created to individually monitor student achievements, and vocational education content can be cheaply and continually improved. The only missing element today is federal Vocational Education leadership.

Our politicians have allowed our TAFE system to slip into being an apathetic, third tier priority. A useful source of consolation prizes for failed colleagues, but a sprawling set of wasteful federal, state and local entities, most emotionally dominated by a sense of tired resignation.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, China is leaping ahead in its plans for technology led living standards improvement for its people. The governments of China and others have made the hardly startling discovery that there is a link between productivity and better lives for people. Back in Aus, our Productivity Commission, having pondered the issues of TAFE and productivity for better than thirty years, is now, at glacial pace, planning a study to see if literacy may be a factor! A productivity review of the PC is long overdue.

A dynamic system of Technical And Further Education won’t be the result of simply chanting “Fee Free” occasionally when the topic comes up in federal parliament. TAFE must be given the status of a senior portfolio. The gateways to an effective vocational education must be opened to all the battlers. The range of knowledge and skills that can be accessed via TAFE must be hugely expanded to reflect the diversity of Australian workplaces. TAFE teachers must be allowed to share their specialist insights, skills and knowledge with students from across the country.

The days when the work of the bloke who popped on the hub caps on the car assembly lines at Dandenong or Elizabeth could be reduced to a list of “competency” dot points to be studied by a better-paid bloke in an office in order to drive productivity improvement are, mercifully, long gone. Alas, the “C”word lingers as a key element of our TAFE system, delaying development, dampening inventiveness, and damaging those denied access to vocational education.

Of course, there is risk in re-directing the funding that supports our current crop of TAFE bureaucracies, CEOs, managers, administrators, committees, contracted-out agencies and consultants. Shit can happen, but the potential benefits far outweigh the dangers of the punt. A dynamic TAFE must be an integral part of a more productive, less wasteful future and better, more satisfying jobs than the hubcap fitters had.

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