In another presentation from a great VET National Teaching & Learning Conference, Dr Suneeti Rekhari from TAFE NSW highlighted how it is seeking to change. Its vision is to be the leading provider of life-long learning, meeting the evolving needs of industry and learners in communities across NSW. It also aims to play an important role in delivering future-focused, responsive, and flexible skills education to the people of NSW, regardless of who they are, or where they live.

First, she noted that, by any measure, TAFE NSW is a big system: 156 teaching locations covering 35 industry areas, with over 1200 courses on scope. It also has around 400,000 enrolled learners and over 13,000 staff. Big systems face big issues in terms of the management of their profile of offerings and ensuring that all their sites and staff deliver to the highest standards possible. To that end they have developed an education quality framework, built around a core of the learner’s experiences and outcomes surrounded by standards, quality areas and continuous improvement. The 5 quality areas they have focused on are:

  • Learning and Assessment: Where learning, training and assessment enables learners to gain industry-relevant skills and knowledge 
  • Learner Support: Which ensures learners are treated fairly and are properly informed, protected and supported 
  • Workforce quality: To ensure learners are trained and assessed by people who are qualified, skilled, committed to continuous learning and development 
  • Industry engagement: Which ensures learners receive relevant skills and knowledge and supports lifelong learning, and finally
  • Robust governance: To ensure they maintain governance processes that enforce self-assurance, oversee the integrity of operations, are committed to quality delivery and foster ongoing continuous improvement.

TAFE’s self-assurance model is represented diagrammatically below:

This approach is built around:

  • Governance: promoting self-regulation through setting clear objectives and KPIs, competent decision making, oversight of quality assurance and defining accountability
  • Policies and Procedures: providing self-guidance through establishing systematic processes, providing accessible tools, templates and guidelines
  • Business Intelligence: allowing TAFE NSW to self-evaluate through regularly conducting evidence-based audits, performing detailed analysis of feedback and data, and initiating external benchmarking, and
  • Capability Uplift: through self-improvement by upskilling of staff as well as improving systems and processes.

They have built a self-assurance assessment tool which also delivers a rating which is built around a green (Going fine), yellow (Need to keep an eye on this) and red light (Need to address issues) system.

Finally, TAFE NSW sees its shift from compliance to quality in terms of:

Moving from: Moving to:
Duplication of compliance and input-focused requirements. Clearer expectation of outcomes
Undue focus on prescriptive compliance, at the expense of good organisational practices. Continuous quality improvement leading practices and innovation.
Layers of regulatory activity – organisational, and government entities   Integrity and governance underpinning assurance.