Collecting ‘total’ vocational education and training activity

Image: austinevan / flickr

30 May 2011.

The National Centre for Vocational Education Research manages, on behalf of all Australian governments, a series of data collections that cover vocational education and training (VET). The primary collection, known as the National VET Provider Collection, captures data on training activity and completions of all students attending a government provider (mostly TAFE institutes) and those students who are funded through state training authorities but whose training is delivered by a private provider.

This arrangement arose from the origins of the provider collection, which was to provide accountability for the expenditure of state training authority funds, jointly provided by the Commonwealth and state or territory governments. As the overall training market has developed, the NCVER provider collection has become more and more deficient in terms of measuring the overall level of vocational education and training. This has been recognised for some years and, in the 2009–10 Commonwealth Budget, NCVER received funding to redress the deficiency. The budget allocation was intended to enable NCVER to expand the provider collection to be comprehensive, in part so that it could be used to select a representative sample of all students to take part in the annual Student Outcomes Survey. This survey would then be able to provide the data required to fully measure two of the six indicators against which the Council of Australian Governments measures progress under the National Agreement for Skills and Workforce Development.

This initiative is floundering for the simple reason that training providers are reluctant to voluntarily supply the necessary data; some because of the cost, others for ‘commercial’ reasons. To remove this impediment to a comprehensive collection, data provision needs to be mandated.

Read the full paper
(free registration to the NCVER site is required to view the paper in full)

Photo: austinevan / flickr

Related Topics

Data

Further education

Research

Students

Education

Related content

Most viewed: This week

1
Smart technologies for older people
2
Legal and governance models for shared services in local government
3
Six provocations for big data
4
Can nations measure well-being?
5
Evidence-free policy making? The case of income management

Noticeboard

Australian Community Sector Survey
03 May 2012

Strengthen our voice - take part in the Australian Community Sector Survey

There's just under two weeks to go for Victoria's community sector organisations to help us provide an authentic snapshot of the state of demand for services in the state.

Women's Health Victoria survey now open
08 March 2012

Women's Health Victoria (WHV) is a statewide women's health promotion, information and advocacy organisation, working with policy makers and health professionals to influence and inform health policy and service delivery.

The online survey is open to anyone who has used WHV's services, resources, or websites in the past 12 months. It covers: WHV publications, professional training, The Index database of gendered statistics, WHV Clearinghouse, BreaCan Service (supporting people diagnosed with breast or gynaecological cancer), capacity building, member services, and more.

Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (the ACNC) starting in July 2012
07 March 2012

In May 2011 the Federal Government announced that the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) would commence operations from 1 July 2012 and that it would initially be responsible for determining the legal status of groups seeking charitable, public benevolent institution, and other not-for-profit (NFP) benefits on behalf of all Commonwealth agencies. 

Topics

APO