Country Labor candidate for Northern Tablelands Ms Debra O’Brien took up answers provided by Member of Northern Tablelands and Minister for Tourism Adam Marshall at a Parliamentary Estimates Committee hearing held early last month.
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Ms O’Brien said that this year’s budget papers failed to reveal the number of students in the TAFE system, despite this act of transparency being the normal practice for years.
“In fact, Mr Marshall admitted that the numbers of TAFE students in the state system had actually gone backwards by 13 per cent, which means 72,000 fewer students than was the case last year,” Ms O’Brien said.
“The damage to technical and vocational education systems is apparent in every suburb and town, especially in regional NSW, where the opportunities for young people to get ahead have dried up like a drought, while the State Government is only interested in one thing – to rip the fees off them before they even start.
“What a disincentive to better yourself.”
Ms O’Brien said she was not surprised by the attempted cover-up.
Mr Marshall said to accuse the government of “covering-up” TAFE’s enrolment figures was laughable. He said the figures were readily available, and, in any case, Ms O’Brien was using last year’s figures.
“The reason the data is no longer published in the NSW Budget is because Treasury has moved to ‘outcomes based reporting’. This was a decision of Treasury, not TAFE,” Mr Marshall said.
“Enrolment data is published by TAFE every year in its annual report, and also by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) in July of each year.
“Check Hansard. The figures Ms O’Brien relies on are simply wrong.”
Hansard recorded the following:
Mr ADAM MARSHALL: There are two bits of information. First, we rely on benchmark and talk about the published NCVER data, which was last released in July this year. It goes on a calendar year basis. For the 2017 calendar year, according to the published enrolment figures for TAFE NSW, that was 479,300.
The Hon. JOHN GRAHAM: That is a dramatic drop, is it not, from the previous year?
Mr ADAM MARSHALL: It is a drop—
The Hon. JOHN GRAHAM: What is the drop?
Mr ADAM MARSHALL: It is a drop of 13.1 per cent or 72,105 students, to be exact, on the 2016 NCVER data.
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Mr Marshall said TAFE NSW was experiencing strong growth and had a $1.77 billion budget in 2018/19, which represented 80 per cent of the NSW Skills Budget.
“Year to Date enrollments are up 10 per cent,” Mr Marshall said.
“Certificate III and IV enrollments (the qualifications most directly related to job outcomes) increased 8.3 per cent and 11.6 per cent respectively in 2017, compared to 2016.”