Strengthening skills sector foundations
The Australian skills sector has undergone huge structural and policy change over the past decade. ACT skills and training providers have needed to change and adapt as major shifts in investment, progressive waves of reform and new skills priorities have impacted the sector. As we rebuild from the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenge is to bed down good reform and ensure all parts of our system are working with the right incentives and objectives.
Our local skills providers are strong and thriving, but there is more we can do to underpin sector foundations. This includes formalising industry engagement arrangements, and ensuring our regulatory and administrative settings support responsive and high-quality training delivery.
The Strategic Compass 2025 – CIT Futures outlines how Canberra’s cornerstone public provider is strengthening foundations for the future. In partnership with the ACT Government, CIT is working towards comprehensive renewal of its programs and offerings, and a significant transformation of its service design and delivery. This renewal program seeks to build on CIT’s strengths, and harness emerging opportunities, as the institute prepares for transition to the new purpose-built Woden campus.
The next National Skills Agreement between the Commonwealth and states and territories provides an opportunity to strengthen national and local skills sector foundations through a positive funding partnership. The ACT Government is open to pursuing significant reforms, like activity-based funding, in a phased and measured way. However, rapid transitions that force change on the sector before it is ready would run counter to governments’ shared ownership of the national training system and quality improvement goals.
By strengthening skills sector foundations, we seek to ensure the ACT’s public and private training providers have the right incentives, capabilities and frameworks to effectively skill our workforce now and in the years to come.
How we are delivering
- We are advocating in the strongest terms for a good deal for the ACT under the new National Skills Agreement. We will not sign up to any new agreement which undermines the role of CIT as the cornerstone of our training system, or sees student fees rise for vulnerable learners, or in core areas of current and future skills need.
- We will work with local industry to strengthen and formalise engagement, to ensure our training system and skilled migration settings are responsive to ongoing and emerging skills needs.
- We will support initiatives to improve the quality and capability of our education and training workforce. This includes exploring pathways for tradespeople into professional teaching roles and better opportunities for educators to remain connected to industry as practitioners.
- We will encourage the transition to e-learning, including investing in workforce capability. Enhancing our approaches will support lifelong learning and the continuous upskilling of Canberrans.
- We will ensure we have the right metrics and performance indicators to measure what counts, and monitor quality in the delivery of training over time. This will include digging deeper than traditional metrics, like training commencement and completion rates, to gain more insight into how well our system is meeting local needs.
- We will work collaboratively with governments to revise the Standards for RTOs 2015 and strengthen the focus on quality, not just compliance.
- We will review the ACT Quality Framework and ACT Training Initiative Funding Agreement to remove unnecessary compliance burden, and build training providers' capacity for self-assessment and continuous improvement.
- We will review funding models to ensure alignment with our priorities, and with learners' and employers' needs. We will work with regulatory bodies, stakeholders and other jurisdictions to streamline and simplify complex structures which have evolved over time.
