The Productivity Commission has released new data for a number of indicators in its Report on Government Services. For VET there is lots of new data and quite a lot of it comes from the NCVER, which many VDC News readers will already be familiar with.
Some of the newer data though is on the people aged 15-64 years who wanted to enrol in a VET qualification in the last 12 months but could not participate. Nationally 2% of men and 3% of women aged 15-64 years were in this category, and while those percentages seem modest – the number of individuals is substantial:
- more than 176,800 men, and
- more than 265,700 women who want to study but face barriers to enrolling.
Wanting to enrol in a VET course, but not being able to, was also much more of an issue in cities rather than in regional and remote areas.
When examined by socio-economic status there were noticeable differences by state and territory. The SES quintile which had the highest proportion of people wanting to do a VET qualification but were unable to do so in each jurisdiction were:
- New South Wales – Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) Quintile 2 (ie the 2ndmost disadvantaged)
- Victoria – Quintile 4 (2ndmost advantaged)
- Queensland – Quintile 1 (most disadvantaged)
- Western Australia – Quintile 4 (2ndmost advantaged)
- South Australia – Quintile 1 (most disadvantaged)
- Tasmania – Quintile 2 (2ndmost disadvantaged)
- ACT – Quintile 5 (most advantaged)
- Northern Territory – Quintile 3 (medium level of disadvantage).
The report also finds that nationally for government-funded VET graduates, median income after training increased by $16,232, and for all VET graduates it increased by $14,256 after training.
By equity group, government-funded VET makes the biggest difference in income for:
- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people: $17,368
- People from remote and regional areas: $16,808
- SEIFA Quintile 1: $15,066
- Women: $13,664
- People with disability: $11,554
