Page 2971 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 15 September 2015
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Madam Speaker, our students deserve to access high quality training that is both flexible and efficient. We must also ensure we provide our schools with the enabling framework to operate in this space. This will necessitate reducing the number of schools operating as registered training organisations, while simultaneously ensuring better cooperation and coordination between schools so as not to limit the choices and quality of programs—indeed, to grow the quality of choice of programs.
Over time we will rationalise the number of schools operating as registered training organisations to implement a network approach to planning and provision, ensuring schools cooperate and not duplicate, reduce costs and better target the VET funds, reduce red tape to reduce the administrative burden on teachers and administrative systems, and increase efficiency and effectiveness of programs in our schools.
It is also imperative that ACT schools access training from reputable providers that model the highest levels of quality assurance and quality control practices in meeting the national training standards. We will improve core systems and business processes to ensure and maintain compliance with the ASQA standards for registered training organisations 2015.
Given our size, it is crucial that the public VET system collaborates on practical issues and shared experiences and makes the best use of public training infrastructure, which is why the Education and Training Directorate will increase collaboration by working in partnership with CIT to explore, identify and implement strategies that support maximising access to shared services, broadened offerings, refined scope of provision, reduced risk and reduced cost. We must also ensure that our core systems enable integration of VET within senior secondary schooling, compliance with national reporting requirements and reporting of VET data. We will work with the BSSS to improve these processes of managing student data and the way we recognise VET in the senior secondary school certificate.
Finally, it is important that our schools prudently and diligently manage their resources to meet the community’s expectations for quality training, increase market stability and encourage industry confidence. To this end we will explore options for the use of resourcing allocations to further enable access to quality provision through reviewing existing funding distribution arrangements, implementing flexible network provision, accessing centralised procurement and incentivising preferred policy outcomes.
The Victoria University consortium was tasked with developing an evidence base for best practice in VET for secondary students and it has delivered that in the form of this report. I appreciate that real and lasting reform will take time and that this will not be achieved overnight. But I am pleased with the level of commitment that I am seeing from the Education and Training Directorate in its response and from the CIT and BSSS as key partners in this reform.
I look forward to the implementation of sustainable innovation that these directions are signalling. Indeed, I am very pleased to see the Tuggeranong network is taking a lead in delivering on this reform and taking very active steps to show other networks
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