ecosystem

Our nation needs to move beyond an unstable and outmoded distinction between higher education and VET, and set the conditions whereby post-secondary providers can innovate more simply whilst ensuring that stakeholders’ interests are protected.

We need to move from binary system to ecosystem, with more diversity of providers, organised around the backbone of a revised Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) and legislative requirements which treat like providers alike.

We could imagine the tertiary ecosystem not as a stratified, hierarchical one, but as flipped on its side, with different types of providers each aiming to be best of their type: best in class.

This ecosystem must be supported by public funds: experience shows that private markets alone will fail to deliver the education and training outcomes we seek as a whole.

But the criteria on which public funds and income-contingent loans are granted need to be explicit, and those principles then applied equally to fit and proper public and private providers offering similar programs at similar levels of quality.

The ecosystem for sharing knowledge and imparting skills needs to be shaped by the four principles of advancing innovation, fairness, efficiency and civil society.

We make 10 broad recommendations, to be implemented in stages, based on the premise that no one really knows what the future holds, and therefore the conditions must be created for institutional innovation, to maximise our prospects.