The addition of courses such as plumbing at Wodonga TAFE will be considered as campuses negotiate the detail of the Victorian government’s budget announcement.
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From January 2019, 30 courses and an additional 18 pre-apprenticeship courses will be provided for free.
Wodonga TAFE chief executive Mark Dixon said 10 of those 30 courses were still to be decided by the government.
“The classic courses in agriculture, in all the building trades, carpentry, hospitality and nursing were announced in the first 20,” he said.
“In the next couple of weeks we’ll have discussions with the department and with industry to determine what other 10 we need to add on there.
“There are some courses on the list Wodonga doesn’t deliver at the moment … that’s partly due to affordably and thin markets, but we’ll reconsider whether we want to do those courses.
“We know there’s strong industry demand for plumbers, they can gain that plumbing qualification in Albury.
“We have to work very closely with Albury TAFE, with industry as well, so if Albury TAFE is providing a good service to the market in this region in say concreting, we would be silly to try and jump in.”
Mr Dixon said the increase in wages for TAFE teachers of 23.7 per cent over four years, confirmed this week, was integral to supporting the free courses.
“We struggled to recruit really good quality teachers because the pay hasn’t been enough … that’s probably been a barrier to our growth,” he said.
“The budget is great news for students and the industrial award agreement separate to the budget is great for the teachers.
“We want people to be very careful about how they exercise their right to the free course.
“The risk is if people don’t have skin in the game; we’re really proud of our completion rate which sits at 92 per cent, so we don’t want to see that drop.
“People have to be eligible to study at the TAFE; the criteria that already exists apply to that free course.”
Mr Dixon said other budget highlights included $108 million for career education in schools.
“Indirectly that’s fabulous news for TAFE,” he said.
“For TAFEs across the network there was $120 million of capital investment, but not for Wodonga, and we’re not unhappy with that, for Wodonga the free courses was by far the biggest thing and that will allow us to grow our enrolments and revenue.
“Everybody talks abut TAFE having funding cuts and that’s absolutely true and takes a long time to recover from that, so to me this is an opportunity for us to really re-establish TAFE as the training provider of first choice in the region.”
The NSW government should follow Victoria’s lead, NSW Greens TAFE spokeswoman Dawn Walker has said.
“As our public vocational education provider, TAFE is the leader in skills training in Australia and essential to meeting the employment needs of the future,” she said.
“The argument that it would be too expensive to abolish TAFE fees at a time when NSW returned a budget surplus $5.7 billion 2016/2017 is pure nonsense.
“The Greens are calling on both the NSW Government and the NSW Labor Party to match Victoria’s lead and commit to making TAFE courses free for NSW students to help meet demand for key workers like mechanics, carpenters, plumbers, electricians and nurses.”
The NSW government allocated $2.2 billion to Vocational Education and Training in the 2017-18 budget, and already offers all pre-apprenticeship and pre-traineeship training for free.
The latest full year enrolment figures show government-funded VET in NSW increased by 49 per cent to almost 525,000 as NSW took over Victoria to become the largest provider of government-funded VET in Australia.
