State and territory education ministers have launched an attack on the Federal Government’s Australian Technical Colleges (ATC) system. New South Wales Education Minister John Della Bosca says “The Australian Technical Colleges are a catastrophic waste of money and they’re a policy failure, an unnecessary duplication of bureaucracy, a mass of red tape and an ideologically driven stunt.” Western Australia Education and Training Minister Mark McGowan says “the Federal Government is being secretive about the colleges’ attrition rates and costs per student because the program has been an embarrassing failure”.
Anyone with even half an idea of how technical education works in Australia could have seen that one coming. Oh wait…I did already. From my Howard’s ‘vision’ for Technical Training post last year.
“Both Tafe and the ATC will be delivering essentially the same programs to the same client base. There will be expensive duplication of facilities and capital works and no doubt, many of the staff for the ATC will be poached from TAFE.
“This is a direct consequence of Howard’s skills and training policy on the run in the campaign for the last election. Rather than coming up with a sensible and practical plan to provide the needed services through cooperation between State and Federal funding, they’ve reinvented the wheel at great cost with quite probably a net detriment to both training and students.
“Instead we get duplication and waste of public funds in an area the Howard government has sytematically neglected for a decade, despite being an essential investment in skilling a nation for the new economy.”
Oh well, if Julie Bishop has her way the whole thing will be outsourced directly to industry owned publicly funded McEducation franchises. I can’t wait to see what a top job they’ll make of that.
Filed under: Economics, Education, Politics, Technology
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