SA VET training hits rock bottom

Just when you thought the South Australian government had buried the VET sector through blithering incompetence, there's a knock from below.

The SA government had poured $568 million in to Skills for All VET course subsidies over the past two financial years - funding an extraordinary boost in the natural therapy and fitness industries - only to be scrapped and replaced recently by WorkReady.

According to the SA government website, "WorkReady will support direct connections between training and jobs at the local level and connect people to the training and employment activity best suited to them over a working lifetime."

How will WorkReady work? No one knows but its being rolled out in July.

Many South Australians are work ready but there isn't any work. Across Australia 850,000 people are hunting for work but there's only 150,000 jobs. South Australia is the worst place in mainland Australia to find a job with real unemployment (non-ABS methodology) above 12 percent.

There are almost 60,000 people unemployed in Crowland with another 20,000 under employed. Youth unemployment is hitting 40 per cent in the northern suburbs. When Holden closes in 2017, more than 3000 people will join the dole queue. Within three years, another 10,000 adults - many of them males over 45 years of age - will join them. A tsunami of mass unemployment is inexorably rolling towards Adelaide.

The state government is hopelessly out of its depth. You'll find some background on the local economy here http://indaily.com.au/opinion/2014/08/19/adelaides-decline-fall/and here http://indaily.com.au/opinion/2015/01/19/sas-unmentionable-problems/

Skills for All was a basket case from go to woe. It was killed off because the state government spent its entire three year budget in the first 18 months through massive over enrolments. It failed to accurately track enrolment numbers, it failed to advertise courses that were strategically important to the state and it failed to track employment outcomes, relying on voluntary student surveys. This is how your tax dollars are being spent.

The Weatherill government has also decided from June to provide TAFE SA with 46,000 of the 51,000 new training places, effectively killing off the private providers.

I'm no lover of private RTOs. There are a number in the CBD and in the northern suburbs that are shockers. But this diktat tars the best trainers such as Business SA with the bottom feeders.

The government is also slashing the number of subsidized courses at TAFE SA from 900 to 700. Funding will shift to courses that offer the best employment prospects. Why wasn't that a cornerstone of Skills for All?

Let me tell you a secret. I was offered the job of rolling out Skills for All in 2011 but when I read the strategy and implementation procedures, I turned it down. I'm pro-albatross but I don't want one hanging around my neck.

The new subsidy list offers almost unlimited subsidies to those wanting to study in the automotive and construction industries - which are crashing – while killing funding to the creative arts, writing and multimedia, which are monetizing.

The real prize for dodging and weaving goes to the SA Minister for Higher Education and Employment, Gail Gago. She told the media, "It was industry itself that determined what courses were redundant and obsolete and which courses were really priority areas," she said. "They told us they wanted the training list streamlined so that those courses that were no longer being used, or had a low public value, were removed."

Gago has washed her hands of TAFE SA claiming that it is run by an independent authority, yet much of this disgrace lies at her feet. The SA government provides the funding and therefore is instrumental in how TAFE SA is run. Some course fees have risen almost 500 percent in the last year.

We heard from Gago last year when a leaked parliamentary briefing note prepared for her showed that SA TAFE plans to slash 814 jobs by 2017-18 as part of a cost-cutting drive. At the time, Gago was unable to provide details on the full four-year impact of the state government's savings drive when questioned in Budget Estimates.

It appears that Minister Gago is not responsible for anything. Combine this with the fact that none of the nine TAFE SA board members have any VET teaching or leadership experience and you have a recipe for disaster. If you were flying, you'd want a qualified pilot in the cockpit. Not in South Australia.

The SA government's Skills for All fiasco has slashed 200 courses, killed off the private providers and provided the raison d'etre for sacking one third of the TAFE SA workforce. A good days work for this hopeless government, surpassed only by a totally inept and invisible opposition.

The chickens have come home to roost in SA. For the last 30 years, the best and brightest prospects in political leadership have left the state, leaving only the dregs. Time after time, 'leaders' with third class minds have floated to the top where they consistently demonstrate incompetence and failure.

It's only a matter of time before the Commonwealth Government intervenes as the state is sinking in to chaos.