TAFE - imperative to Australian education and infrastructure

In addition to its basic function of providing vocational training, TAFE plays an important role in ensuring that those who do not see themselves as 'university-capable' come to appreciate their own abilities and capacity for study and higher learning. In the US, studies show that students from disadvantaged backgrounds run the risk of 'dropping out' from higher education (college and university), because they face obstacles not confronted by their more advantaged fellows. Education is, say these findings, playing a 'growing role … in preserving class divisions' with 'the gaps … growing'. This directly relates back to the emphasis upon education and training being intertwined with earning prospects. In the US, 'thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference between the share of prosperous and poor Americans who earned bachelor's degrees … Now the gap is 45 points'.

That outcome is a consequence of there being no foundation for higher learning provided by the education sector in the US, with students who achieve in secondary education lacking supports enabling them to succeed at university. The result is a high-level sense of failure – a loss of self-esteem, a crisis of self-belief, and a destruction of the hopes for the high-level achievement to which their secondary school results led them to aspire. In Australia, TAFE plays a role that can counter the poverty of support existing in the US – a role that must be maintained and, indeed, increased, if those ordinarily cut out of higher education are to be able to succeed, and the class hierarchy of education and society be countered.

The notion that TAFE should limit itself to vocational education and training leading solely to paid employment is firmly fixed in the philosophy that the status quo should be preserved. Yet to date, TAFE has succeeded in playing a tripartite role in the education and training sector. It has done this by, first, ensuring that its focus on vocational outcomes matches industrial gaps: TAFE far better than private providers has been attuned to industry needs and the changing face of employment. Secondly, TAFE has provided education and training for those who are transitioning from one field of employment to another: essential in a world where 'downsizing' and redundancies have become a standard in so many areas of paidwork. Thirdly, TAFE has played a crucial role in building capability-recognition in those who ordinarily would not believe themselves to be tertiary sector and particularly 'university material'. Beyond all this, TAFE provides creative learning for students from and of all backgrounds, seeking to learn for learning's sake, desiring expansion of their brains for the purpose of stimulating thought, and in pursuit of intellectual endeavour because it is inspiring, expanding of the mind, and adds to their capacity to contribute in and to the world.

The Howard government's disproportionate funding to private schools was a measure designed to maintain the class system through denying the government school sector funds it desperately required. In 1996, 'for every $1.00 spent on a student in a public school, the federal government spent £4.40 (recurrent) on each private school student'. This meant that by 2005, 'for every $1.00 spent on a child in a public school, 'the government' spent $5.63 on every private school student'.

The current attack on TAFE heralds a continuation of this policy.

As Christopher Stone concludes, TAFE has the 'ability to work for everyone' and does so. Echoing Chomsky, he observes that the role played by TAFE for disadvantaged groups 'is a challenge to … state governments that are implementing or considering large cuts to TAFE funding …' Why, he says, are cuts 'being made to education providers that are clearly using these public funds to provide opportunities to all'? Why are governments 'choosing not to make this investment when everyone wins?'

Preventing TAFE from continuing as premier VET provider, down-grading it and its achievements and, along with this, those of its teachers, trainers and students, is destructive of not only of the institution in itself, but of a key part of and contributor to Australian infrastructure. Yet perhaps the answer is that 'everyone winning' is not the aim of governments intent on undoing TAFE, its standing and its role.

To paraphrase Chomsky, it is 'very frightening for those who have some degree of privilege and power' to accept, much less support, the freedom that comes through education, particularly for those who have traditionally been denied such freedom.