the essential role of good, patient employers in
equipping young people with the opportunity and
confidence to succeed in the workplace. The VET
system cannot replicate that experience.”
exercise of occupational skill and autonomy. Largely the content and structure of Certificate III qualifications is sound because it draws on long-established com- munities of trust: tight networks of employers, professional associations, unions, licensing bodies, consumers and training providers who recognise, despite their different goals, their common interest in producing and defending rigorous and contemporary qualifications for their industries and sectors. The development of the new Certificate III in Individual Support, which replaced separate qualifications for aged care, disability care and home care, also shows that the qualification can adapt to suit a labour market that requires workers to be adaptive and plan a career spanning multiple occupations. However, there are some big challenges for the Certificate III level.
The first is ensuring that the apprenticeship model remains viable in the modern work and education landscape. Occupations traditionally served by apprentice- ships are shrinking as a proportion of the total workforce, and efforts to extend the apprenticeship model into new occupations have stalled. At the same time, many employers seeking apprentices report a lack of suitable applicants. Reports that many young people are dissuaded from apprenticeships (often by parents, teachers and careers advisors) because of perceptions of low status, poor earn- ings and uncomfortable working conditions are longstanding.
The second issue is ensuring that the quality and standing of the qualifications generally is not undermined by poor quality providers. The key indicators of quality are time, experienced and qualified instructors, and connections with industry and workplaces. The regulator, Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA), conducted audits of the Certificate III qualifications in aged care (in 2013) and early childhood (in 2015). Alarmingly, it found that one third of providers offering the aged care qualification were offering students the potential to complete the qualification in less than 15 weeks.12 One in five providers offering the early childhood qualifica- tion allowed the student to complete in less than 26 weeks.13 In both cases this is substantially lower than the AQF guideline of at least 52 weeks (and they are only that – guidelines; the Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF) standards do not enforce a minimum standard because it is seen as contrary to the principle of competency-based progression). Failure to have staff with suitable qualifications and currency is one of the most common breaches identified by ASQA during its regular audits.
After the Certificate III, the most established VET qualification level is the Diploma. The Diploma provides recognition for senior, experienced VET-qualified workers, from a longer and more intense period of study or by building on the foundation established by an earlier Certificate III qualification. Strong career pathways exist for Diploma-qualified workers in electro-technology and engineering, for science and medical technicians, in financial services, in nursing, and early childhood education and care.
Yet the most common diploma courses are in more general areas such as busi- ness and community services, where the career pathways are much less distinct. Particularly when the number of business degree graduates has also increased, the boom of diploma enrolments in these fields is likely to erode the value of a diploma qualification.
Further eroding the value of the Diploma qualification has been the many VET FEE-HELP related scandals. Multiple parliamentary inquiries have documented the stories of unscrupulous training providers signing people up to Diploma courses for which they are manifestly unsuitable and unprepared, and then pro- viding little in the way of face-to-face delivery
(often these courses are online-only) or other learning support.14 Unsurprisingly, completion rates are very low. Even more alarmingly, the quality of provision in some of these for-profit providers has been so low that regulators have actually revoked qualifications. In the most notable case, the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority recalled qualifications from 9500 graduates from the Registered Training Organisations owned by Vocation.15 Overall, these instances are undermining public confidence in the VET system and the Diploma qualification.
The VET system overall would be better off if more VET diplomas were built around tighter labour market connections. In general, the boundary between a VET diploma from a higher education diploma (or even a higher education degree) is fuzzy. There are a range of measures that could be adopted to achieve this, including making workplace placements a requirement of all courses, develop- ing stronger professional associations in these fields so that they can have more input into qualification design, and potentially removing courses with poor labour market outcomes. In the demand-driven era where universities are aggressively dropping entry scores to compete with VET for students, and pursuing other strategies such as establishing their own diploma-offering subsidiaries, it might make more sense for the VET system to remove tertiary preparation from its still- long list of functions.16
Having said that, we will continue to see providers operating across the higher education-VET divide, whether they be dual sector universities, TAFE institutes offering degree programs, or private providers such as Navitas offering VET and higher education courses. The main distinction being that tertiary preparation courses do not need to be offered as VET courses under the AQF, since doing so seems to pull the quality framework in one direction too many.
VET should increasingly focus on the Certificate III (perhaps with a new name) and the Diploma qualification. Some Certificate IV and Advanced Diploma qualifi- cations fill specific occupational niches but in general are not well anchored in the labour market. Simply put, is there enough room between what a Certificate III worker can do and what a Diploma worker can do for a distinct Certificate IV role to be viable? Very tight pay relativities between the different levels suggests not.17 Phasing out these qualifications could help to focus the VET system and improve the understanding of its role among industry, students and the community more broadly.