Sense about improving education, before the political bulldust flies

In the looming election campaign we’ll be hearing a lot of silly, scary and self-serving stuff. Who’s better on the ukulele, ScoMo or Albo? Who’s the more “human”? Which side “won the week”?

We’ll see the content of carefully compiled “dirt files”. Each side accusing the other of hypocrisy. The other side’s policies have been/would be absolutely frightening.

Great. I can’t wait. But last week I ran across the thoughts of someone who’s had much experience in governance, but isn’t running for office. He was on about education – a topic of direct or indirect relevance to us all – but one that won’t be heard once all the shouting starts.

He’s Professor Peter Shergold, former head of the Prime Minister’s Department under John Howard, but these days chancellor of the University of Western Sydney and writer of government reports.

At every level of education – early childhood education and care, schools, universities and vocational education and training – the polite judgement on our performance is: could do better.

Shergold had many sensible things to say in a report to federal and state education ministers that lobbed only after the plague had begun.

He starts by putting education in a broader, more balanced context. “Education must prepare young people both for active citizenship in a democratic society and for purposeful engagement with the labour force,” he writes.

“This is vital at a time when trust in democratic governance and institutions is at a low level and cognitive technologies are transforming the future of work.”

School leavers don’t just need to be employable. They need to be adaptable, flexible and confident. Education must provide students with the essential attributes they require for lifelong learning in whatever fields of endeavour they may choose, he says.

The professional and applied skills they need will change significantly over their lives. The jobs they do will be transformed. Most will switch careers.

Academic achievement is important but not the sole reason for schooling. We need to focus more on preparing the whole person, no matter what career path they choose. Many senior secondary students enjoy school. Some, for a variety of reasons, just want to leave as soon as possible. Both groups need to be supported by more flexible learning.

Education will remain the foundation of a “fair go” Australia, Shergold says. Senior secondary students from disadvantaged backgrounds should be supported to ensure they can follow the same pathways available to others.

Literacy, numeracy and digital literacy should be recognised as essential skills for every student. At a time of technological transformation, when the future of work is uncertain, these attributes are more important than ever, he says.

Students must be supported to attain capabilities in these areas before they finish school. “Every young person who leaves school without them is having their economic and social future short-changed.”

All pathways through school should be delivered to the same high standard. While university will remain an aspiration for many young people, academic pathways should no longer enjoy more privileged access to school resources than apprenticeships, traineeships or other vocational education and training.

Shergold gets more specific in a report he wrote for the NSW Education Department with someone whose name seems familiar, a David Gonski. They find that vocational education and training – VET – is plagued by problems across the nation.

Skills development hasn’t received the level of government investment required, which has helped reinforce the public perception that VET is less valuable than university education. This misconception is too often instilled in students while they’re still at school.

When they move on from high school, they enter a world bifurcated between university and vocational education. Forced to choose, many opt for a uni degree, for which there are no upfront costs, rather than paying fees for certificate-level vocational education.

Partly because career advice is so poor, many parents and students believe the demand for vocationally qualified workers is in decline. This is utterly mistaken, Shergold and Gonski say.

Federal figures on skilled occupations show shortages in many trades, including mechanics, panel beaters, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, plasterers, carpenters and cabinet-makers. A rapid rise in demand is forecast for certificate-trained workers in child care, aged care and disability care.

Get this: a “significant proportion” of uni graduates then move to VET to enhance their employability. It’s clear to me that a lot of kids who struggle through uni (with many failing to make it) would have been better going to VET.

Little wonder Shergold and Gonski want to bring universities and VET into a single system. They want much better career advice, which should be available to people throughout their working lives, including those obliged to make mid-career changes.

They want senior secondary schooling to be less obsessed with having kids direct all their efforts to maximising a single number, the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank. There are better ways for unis to select good recruits. And high schools could do more to get students started on a vocational “pathway”.

All this is worth debating in the coming weeks – but ain’t likely to be.

Read more >>

Too many school leavers are off to uni

If you had a youngster leaving school, what would you encourage them to do? Get a job, go to university, or see if there was some trade that might interest them? For a growing number of parents, that's a no-brainer: off to uni with you. But maybe there should be more engaging of brains.

It's widely assumed that, these days, any reasonably secure, decently paid career must start with a university degree.

Don't be so sure. The latest projections by the federal Department of Employment (since renamed by Malcolm Turnbull's spin doctors as the Department of Jobs and Small Business) are for total employment to grow by 950,000 over the five years to 2022.

The department projects that fewer than 100,000 of those extra jobs – less than 10 per cent – will be for people with no post-school qualifications.

More than 410,000 of the jobs – 43 per cent – will be for people with a bachelor degree or higher qualification.

But that leaves more than 440,000 of the jobs – 47 per cent – for people with the diplomas or certificates (particularly the "cert III" going to trades people) that come from TAFE.

Now, even the Department of Jobs possesses no crystal ball. But these educated guesses should be enough to disabuse you of the notion there'll be no decent jobs for people who haven't gone to uni.

But graduate jobs are better paid, right? Yes, but not by as much as you may think.

Figures issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Monday show that, in August last year, the median (middle) pre-tax earnings of employees with a bachelor degree were $1280 a week, whereas for employees with a cert III or IV trade qualification it was $1035 a week.

And my guess is, if we keep stuffing things up the way we have been – taking in too many uni entrants and too few TAFE entrants – that gap will narrow, with certificate-holders' wages growing faster than graduates' wages.

While we were engrossed watching the Barnaby show, Labor's shadow education minister, Tanya Plibersek, was announcing its election policy to conduct a "once-in-a-generation" review of post-school education, with a view to establishing a single, integrated tertiary education system, putting universities and TAFE on an equal footing.

Her announcement was welcomed by the ACTU and the Business Council. Both sides know well how badly we've stuffed up young people's choice between uni and TAFE.

Plibersek was hardly going to admit it, but the problem goes back to missteps by the sainted Julia Gillard when education minister, made worse by state governments of both colours.

In 2010 she replaced the system where the feds set the number of new undergraduate places they were prepared to fund, and the numbers in the various degree categories, introducing a system where uni entry numbers were "demand-driven".

After decades in which their federal funding had been squeezed, the vice-chancellors couldn't believe their luck.

Particularly those at regional and outer suburban unis went crazy, lowering their admission standards and admitting hugely increased numbers. Did they employ a lot more academics to teach this influx of less-qualified students? Not so much.

It's likely many of these extra students will struggle to reach university standards – unless, of course, exams have been made easier to accommodate them.

Those who abandon their studies may find themselves lumbered with HECS-HELP debt without much to show for it. Many would have done better going to TAFE.

Meanwhile, TAFE was being hit by sharp cuts in federal funding (no doubt to help cover the extra money for unis) and subjected to the disastrous VET experiment.

The problem was that parts of the states' union-dominated TAFE systems had become outdated and inflexible, tending to teach what it suited the staff to teach rather than the newer skills employers required and students needed to be attractive to potential employers.

Rather than reform TAFE directly, however, someone who'd read no further than chapter one of an economics textbook got the bright idea of forcing TAFE to shape up by exposing it to cleansing competition from private providers of "vocational education and training".

To attract and accommodate the new, more entrepreneurial for-profit training providers, the feds extended to the VET sector a version of the uni system of deferred loans to cover tuition fees. State governments happily played their part in this cost-saving magic answer to their TAFE problem.

The result was to attract a host of fly-by-night rip-off merchants, tricking naive youngsters into signing up for courses of dubious relevance or even existence, so the supposed trainers could get paid upfront by a federal bureaucracy that took an age to realise it was being done over.

Eventually, however, having finally woken up, the present government overreacted. Now it's much harder to get federal help with TAFE fees than uni fees.

Far too little is being done to get TAFE training properly back in business after most of the for-profit providers have faded into the night.

The Turnbull government surely knows more must be done to ensure all those who should be training for technical careers are able to do so. In last year's budget it established an (inadequate) Skilling Australians Fund, and more recently suspended the demand-driven uni funding system.

It would be better if it joined Labor in supporting a thorough-going review of our malfunctioning post-school education arrangements.

Read more >>