A SEEMINGLY favourable vocational training fee freeze for 2016 has drawn fire from NSW Greens MP Dr John Kaye.
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The freeze was announced on November 4 by NSW Minister for Skills John Barilaro.
Students seeking training through private or public providers, such as TAFE, will be billed at 2015 prices.
Dr Kaye felt TAFE would inevitably be forced to find more savings to make up the resulting deficit from the freeze.
“It means that TAFE colleges don’t get any increase in their total funding per student, and the existing amount is completely inadequate,” he said.
“Secondly, it means that the level which fees are being frozen is already too high, and they should have been reduced,” he said.
From the launch of the Smart and Skilled reforms in January 2016, subsidised course fees were fixed proportionally at a qualification price.
“So they’re at a fixed ratio to each other, so what the government did by freezing the fees, was they also froze at the same time, with few exceptions, their own subsides,” Dr Kaye said.
“And that was confirmed (on Monday) night, by Philip Clark who is chair of the NSW Skills board.”
The Greens MP questioned how high the fees would jump in 2017 when the freeze was lifted.
A spokesperson for Mr Barilaro said fees are based on the qualification not semester and are reviewed annually.
“The Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) advised the government on prices and recommended an annual increase in line with the Consumer Price Index,” the spokesperson said.
Dr Kaye believed the NSW government had another agenda.
“Lurking somewhere we can’t actually find where it is, there’s a five year program with fees,” he said.
“We don’t know what that actually is, and we’re trying to get to the bottom of it.”
The fee freeze is accompanied by six certificates reduced by $710 and one by $550 in Auslan, English for further study and pathway courses toward vocation and study.
Mr Barilaro was asked by The Inverell Times why the NSW government decided on the 2016 fee freeze only one year after the Smart and Skilled reform implementation, but did not issue a response.
Dr Kaye said the current situation was a train crash of unparalleled proportions.
“The NSW government, together with the previous federal Labor government directed vocational education and training towards an iceberg, and it’s now leaking,” he said. “There are real concerns that TAFE cannot be viable in this environment.”
