TAFE teachersâ award is a dead weight on new ideas and reform
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The biggest problem facing the countryâs leading training provider, TAFE NSW, is aspects of the award under which teachers are employed which is so generous they only have to teach for 36 weeks a year, according to a former deputy director-generalof TAFE NSW, Robin Shreeve.
In December, a damning investigation by the NSW auditor into a failed restructure of NSW TAFE found that governance in the organisation was ânot fit for purposeâ and its commercial objectives conflicted with the social objectives demanded of it by law.
The Australian Productivity Commission's report says the apprenticeship pathway "can be time consuming and act as a major barrier", taking up to four years to complete.
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State governments should give TAFEs autonomy over industrial relations to get better value for the $6.4 billion in taxpayers money that pours into the training sector, which remains so divided and unco-ordinated that one former managing director of NSW TAFE described conditions as archaic .
The recommendation is part of the final report of the Productivity Commission on a new national agreement between the states and Canberra to revamp the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector.
Apprentice numbers have dropped sharply.
Gary Medlicott
Other recommendations include giving a federal committee the power to speed up the way training packages are created, which infamously took six years in one case.