“From today, Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap,” British PM Andy Burnham announced, Tuesday. “The Prime Minister is determined to put technical education on an equal footing with the traditional academic path and to ensure there are ‘no dead ends’ for young people coming out of the education system,” is the take-away in a statement including support from a dozen-plus trades and industry organisation officials – but curiously, no Vice-Chancellors. The Brits must have been reading ATEC’s mind.
***
Jason Clare had the lines that sold the extension of Paid Prac last week, “These are the people who, when you ring Triple 000, they come to your rescue or when you hurt yourself, they help you to get back to work; if you have a stroke, they give you the speech therapy that helps you to find your voice again. They are the front line of our health system and this will help them to stay at uni and to finish their uni degrees.”
But that did not stop elite lobbies in human and animal medicine lamenting future members are excluded. Or industry advocates at the other income end. Jenny Dodd from TAFE Directors Australia lamented that Certificate IV Allied Health students will not score the $338 a week for their 100 mandatory prac hours (dip students do). Still, it could be worse; the Cert IV is on the Free TAFE list.
***
Stephen Duckett comments on his private LinkedIn page that “democracy needs the humanities” and it is “so important to get pricing of higher education right.”
“What,” you ask “the Stephen Duckett who is a commissioner of ATEC and is leading work on a costing model for university courses?” That’s the bloke.
***
Whatever ICAC reports, it is not the only assessment Uni Wollongong has to worry about – ratings agency S&P downgrades its long-term rating outlook from stable to negative. “The university's cash and investments may continue to fall relative to operating expenses … its debt metrics may not improve as much as we expect over the next one to two years” are the reasons.
S&P points to government policy changes on international student numbers and warns, “although the university is undertaking a project to cut costs to offset the lower than planned revenue, we believe there is a chance its financial metrics may weaken.”
This is a separate problem to the outcome (expected next month) of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption’s inquiry into UoW over employing people and awarding contracts. The Uni Wollongong group cut $50m in staff costs over 2024 and 2025 and still made a headline loss of $46m last year (the underlying result was breakeven) and there are more job losses to come.
It was enough for S&P last July, but not now.
***
The VET commentariat is alarmed by training numbers. The estimable National Centre for Vocational Education Research reports domestic students were up 10,000 or so, but the working age participation rate was down 0.3% to 26.4%.
Traditional qualifications, the courses commonly taught at TAFE, took the hit, down 100,000 to 1.98m, while stand-alone fee-paying single subject enrolments, the vast majority in private providers, were up 3% to nearly 9m. It continues an almost unbroken trend since 2016. Most of the single-subjects are work-task related, such as first aid, serving alcohol, working at heights and don’t have the status of a trade, but they get people jobs. As Megan Lilly (Jobs and Skills Australia) put it in June, “People move sideways across fields, pause and return to study, stack short courses over time, and seek recognition for learning acquired through work and life experience.”
***
Greek community organisations in Melbourne are considering kicking in cash so La Trobe U can keep teaching their language and culture – again. There was a 2020-21 bail-out to keep Greek alive at LT U. That time, the State Government helped out with $40,000 for scholarships, badged as a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Greece’s independence; but alas Greek is again on the exit list.
***
OPEN AI says “the benefits of frontier AI should not be concentrated in a few companies and well-resourced labs.” So it is providing free access to “frontier models” for 100,000 maths, science and engineering researchers at 505 selected academic institutions worldwide. The locals are the Fab Five, Melbourne, Monash, UNSW, UoQ and Sydney, Plus ANU, Macquarie, RMIT and UTS.
Across the ditch four (that’s half the national system) will have access – Auckland, Massie, Otago and Wellington.
There is no word on the selection process, but FC guesses artificial intelligence helped.
***
Uni Wollongong perseveres with its JV plan for a “health and wellbeing precinct” – adjacent to its beach-side Innovation Campus. It will be a “place for living, learning, working and growing in an environment that supports complete physical, social, and mental health and wellbeing.” Ways to make it happen include 249 retirement apartments, 180 aged care beds and a 60-place childcare centre. The project has been in planning for years.
Western Sydney U is also partnering with a developer to turn underutilised land at its Werrington campus into a low/medium density suburb. It’s up for community consultation, but the NSW Government is making positive noises.
Sometimes Vice-Chancellors with lots of space are misunderstood to be, as Damian Cahill famously put it, “morphing into property developers with a side-hustle in education.”
***
“With more than 800,000 enrolments, Free TAFE is opening doors for Australians and enabling them to get the skills they want for the jobs we need. But numbers don’t tell the whole story,” Skills and Training Minister Andew Giles told the comrades at Labor’s National Conference. Releasing detailed attrition stats and costs would certainly add to it.
***
2026 college and service provider budgets are being re-forecast at ANU, perhaps because of concerns revenue could fall short of the target for balanced books this year. Domestic UG enrolments for the full-year are not as hoped, neither are international numbers. Plus the promise to ring-fence National Institutions Grant funding means some academic units will lose money that was available for operating expenses in the past.
After the staff revolt that ended former VC Genevieve Bell’s staff-cut savings, this was not supposed to happen. But it appears preparation for explaining bad news is underway. In June Interim VC Rebekah Brown told a Senate committee the “reputational impact in terms of our donor pipeline and our international agents' work with international student recruitment (is) in the order of $100 million.”
It will be a stretch if anybody blames a deficit on Professor Bell and her supporters on ANU Council, given they are all gone, and their plan delivered $74.8 in recurrent savings as of February. The recent Australian National Audit Office report on the university’s finances was scathing in its criticism of Bell’s financial planning, but also stated, “ANU still shows strong overall financial health on measures like audited net operating results, credit ratings and net assets. However, a trend of declining average five-year surpluses raises questions about whether the current financial model is sustainable over the longer term.”
Still, at least strategy is sorted – Strategy Director Ant Bagshaw started in April and will leave in September; it was a six-month appointment.
***
Uni Newcastle staff have backed the union-recommended new enterprise agreement. It includes core asks from the National Tertiary Education Union’s national ask, including a 20% flat pay rise (21.5 % or thereabouts over the agreement) and extending 17% super to casual staff. It took a while to get it done; bargaining generally does at UoN. Talks started in April 2025 and management asked the Fair Work Commission to get involved in discussions last November. Just as it did in 2018 and 2023.