The Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) has restated its call for a comprehensive national review of Australian vocational education and training (VET). Such a review will “underpin future funding arrangements, along with improved data and transparency to help stakeholders make more informed decisions.”
CEDA’s Professor Rodney Maddock spoke at CCA’s annual conference in Melbourne in July 2017, outlining the background to CEDA’s 2016 VET report.
The latest VET review recommendation comes from CEDA’s just-released report, How unequal? Insights on inequality, which examines the distribution of benefits from Australia’s prolonged period of economic growth; whether inequality has increased in Australia during this period; and where policy interventions could assist.
“Along with national VET review recommendations from the Business Council of Australia, the ACTU and the Federal Labor Opposition, it is clear that the future of VET engages Australia’s economists, national business leaders and political leaders,” said Dr Don Perlgut, CEO of Community Colleges Australia.
“CCA has endorsed the need for such a national review, one that takes into account the contributions of Australia’s vital not-for-profit community education providers, most of whom do the ‘heavy lifting’ by working with Australia’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged learners and communities,” Dr Perlgut said.
“Tellingly, one of the three photos on the cover of the report is of the ‘tent city’ of homeless people that sprung up outside the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Sydney headquarters on Martin Place,” said Dr Perlgut. (See image below)
The CEDA report includes the following chapters:
- “Inequality and fairness”, by Dr Simon Longstaff AO FCPA, Executive Director The Ethics Centre
- “Measuring inequality”, by Associate Professor Nicholas Rohde, Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics Griffith University and Professor Lars Osberg, McCulloch Professor of Economics, Dalhousie University, Halifax
- “Educational inequality”, by Laura Perry, Associate Professor of Education policy and comparative education, Murdoch University
- “Employment inequality”, by Professor Alison Sheridan, Professor of Management, UNE Business School
- “Geographical inequality”, by Patricia Faulkner AO, Chair Jesuit Social Services
- “Intergenerational inequality”, by Professor Peter Whiteford, Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU
- “Distributional impacts of future opportunities”, by Nicholas Davis, Head of Society and Innovation, World Economic Forum
A summary of the report (PDF, 3mb) can be downloaded here.
The full copy of the report (PDF, 4mb, 142 pages) can be downloaded here.
CEDA is a national, independent, not-for-profit member-based organisation providing thought leadership and policy perspectives on the economic and social issues affecting Australia. CEDA’s membership includes more than 750 of Australia’s leading businesses and organisations, and leaders from a wide cross-section of industries and academia.
Image credit: Don Perlgut
