November 2017

Educational success may look different in regional Australia Demand-driven higher education funding was introduced in 2012. All eyes have since been on the university sector’s role in increasing the proportion of young people with tertiary education A recent report from Curtin University’s National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education (NCSEHE) might give us pause […]

Training packages may be missing the mark There is no shortage of forecasts about how digital technology will disrupt occupations and workplaces over the next 10-20 years. Artificial intelligence (AI), big data, automation of repetitive work – drones too, as noted in the last VDC News – will reconstruct our understandings of what it means

A new report links graded VET assessments with improved productivity Paul Krugman, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for economics, once wrote: ‘Productivity isn’t everything, but, in the long run, it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output

Business Council of Australia proposes a single tertiary education funding model The Business Council of Australia (BCA) has launched a discussion paper that runs headlong into ongoing national debates about university and VET funding. But instead of engaging in the debate about how those sectors are funded, the BCA has set out to take the

On international comparisons, Australian VET graduates underperform on LLN skills Almost one in five recently graduated Australian VET student’s lacks basic literacy and numeracy skills. Numeracy skills are a particular problem. To put this in an international perspective, our VET graduates do much better on LLN skills than those in the United States, England and

Learning from other nations about how to put innovation runs on the board The most recent VDC Newsletter considered the underutilised potential of the VET system to contribute to innovation in Australia’s public and private sectors (Hands-on innovation: Applied research as part of VET’s job description). It’s a topic prompting detailed attention across the country,