Budget spares ITOs

Competenz Chief Executive John Blakey believes ITOs were spared in the latest budget announcement and by doing so, the Government is signaling the right message to us.

John highlights some of the good signals, including:

• All areas of tertiary education and training have been asked to improve productivity and the CPI adjustment was brought forward by 12 months
• Future funding will be more performance based
• Compliance costs will be reduced
• Closing the gap between ITO funding and ITP funded programmes.

John believes ITOs easily have the potential to improve their efficiency in order to absorb the loss of the CPI adjustment and still improve outputs. “I’m confident Competenz can make the necessary changes in the way we operate to allow us to continue to improve and to be more effective with the revenue provided.”

It’s more important for Government to look at the long term issues facing trade and industry training. The trades have and continue to be the poor cousins of the tertiary sector.

“We need to address this. There is plenty of money and there are enormous opportunities to do better. The real issue is how funds allocated to tertiary education and training are spent,” said John.