Skills Recognition - Small Business Solutions

Presenter - John Tucker
Qld State Manager, Small Business Solutions
13/08/08 – Pavilion on the Park
SA Workplace Assessors Network Relaunch Breakfast

What is the role and purpose or a modern VET practitioner?
How is it different to a traditional teacher?
Is your RTO business currently driven by a demand model or a supply model?

TAFEs are operating in a supply model – this is what we offer – but needs to move to a demand model – offer what’s needed in the training market – this will take a significant shift.

Do you need to speak English to complete a skills recognition process in a VET Business Qualification?

Is it possible to recognize competencies and coach, mentor or help a client at the same time? That is, to do two things at once?

A change in focus from RTOs:
- Courses for Sale to Job Solutions
- Fixed Product List to Tailored Solutions
- Supply Driven to Demand Driven

Small Business Solutions is a product mixing business mentoring to support small business owners with a seamless qualification outcome – present two products together to small business – offer them a way of improving their business – and at the same time provide a qualification – seamlessly.

Business Owners want:
- one on one mentoring – someone to come to them
- real tangible benefits to the business
- small business means small budget

Mentors:
Small Business Solutions mentors are real life small business experts with whom small business owners can identify with. Credibility of the business mentor is paramount. Mentors with English as a Second Language is beneficial to deal with businesses from different cultural backgrounds. Business mentors also have an ‘assessor’s’ hat whilst they are mentoring the business owners. The mentoring solution must also need to be able to offer skills gap training. This system recognizes that this skills gap training is not always formal training – offer a range of small business training options through other a ‘training events’ calendar of their website.

Challenges faced by Small Business Solutions:
- Commercially focused mentors need to be skilled in assessment
- Clients are not qualifications focused particularly at the start
- Finding the right funding model

Offering recognition processes for a Certificate IV in Small Business Management

Skilling Solutions offer training vouchers which can be used to partly pay for the process.

Features of this model
- Mentors are the assessors
- Educational quality is the responsibility of the educational facilitators in conjunction with the assessor
- Tailored to the individual’s need

This system offers a great way of interacting with industry.

The initial profiling of the small business owner helps determine whether they will be able to gain recognition – if not – directed into training.

This service is customer centric.

Skills First RPL Resources
Skills First RPL Assessor Kits

Education is key – but is it fair and equitable for all?

Recently I’ve heard the phrase “Education is key” referred to some key people in education: Professor Roger Thomas, Director, Centre for Indigenous Research and Studies, and Konrad Glogowski, PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, in his blog post Working towards Agency-Building Practice.

A series of conversations with a fellow parent and close friend regarding her concerns about some of the other parents at our children’s school trying to avoid the ‘welfare to work’ process, a system to ‘wean’ single parents of the welfare system, made me wonder:

‘Why doesn’t everyone want to improve themselves, participate in life long learning, and/or enter the workforce?’

As a person who values all of these and who is surrounded by friends and colleagues who feel likewise, I was perplexed to learn that these parents did not have these same values.

Why doesn’t everyone have the ‘aspiration’ to climb the ladder of ‘success’?

A conversation with an indigenous colleague at the Conference on Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship (CETS) helped me understand this difference in ‘valuing education’. He told me how as a child he would often visit an uncle, who owned and managed a large bed and breakfast business in a neighbouring country town. On one such visit, another, younger cousin accompanied them to ‘uncle’s’ holiday home and asked the question: “does a black fella own this big house?”

This young cousin could not conceive that an indigenous people would be able to achieve anything like this.

So these situations kept me thinking:

Why do some people climb the ladder to success, whilst others don’t?

Here are some of the different reasons why I think people are not using their ‘key’ to success:

- “I know ‘education is key’ but I’m not good enough to access at it”
- “I don’t know ‘education is key’ so I don’t try to access it”
- “I know ‘education is key’ but I don’t know how to access it”
- “I know ‘education is key’, but I just don’t want to know how to access it”

So, if ‘education is key’ why do we have these situations?

Is part of the problem related to the homogenization of our educational systems?

“….. public schools enrol approximately 90 percent of students with disabilities, Aboriginal students and those from isolated and remote settings, the average cost of this public education provision is higher than in private schools” Elites safe from ‘Education Revolution’, Pg 6 AEU Journal SA Vol 40, No 1, February 2008

The endogenous and exogenous privatisation our education system is creating “economies of student worth in which student are deemed to be desirable, or not, on the basis of whether they are perceived to be an asset or a liability in relation to the performance benchmarks to which institutions must aspire.

In such local economies of student worth those who are seen as having high levels of academic ‘ability’ and as being easy to manage and teach are highly valued and sought after by institutions. Conversely, those students who are perceived as being of lower academic ‘ability’, or have special needs, or are perceived as presenting behavioural challenges, or who are recent immigrants with additional language needs are avoided.

These processes, driven by the demands of the education market, mark a shift from all students being perceived as learners to a narrow conception of the student and learner defined in terms of external performance indicators.”

This research, by Dr Stephen Ball and Dr Deborah Youdell from London University, commissioned by Education International found “marketised education systems…. can lead to segregation and homogenization of populations” and support the “…. growing gaps between the most advantaged socio-economic groups and the least advantaged groups as well as between ethnic majorities and particular minority ethnic groups.” Hidden privatization in public education, Pg 19 AEU Journal SA Vol 40, No 3, May 2008

Education is key – but is it fair and equitable for all?
The perceptional ‘hierarchy’ of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, those that are ‘able’ and those which are ‘unable’, and those who are given all of the ‘opportunities’ and those that are left to ‘struggle’ are supporting the self fulfilling ‘prophecy’ that the ‘liabilities’ of our education system are not expected to succeed so why should they even aspire to.

Notes from the Conference on Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship - 04/07/08

University of Adelaide – School of Education

Closing the gap in the Education Revolution

Professor Roger Thomas
Centre for Indigenous Research & Studies

What do we need to do in education to make a ‘shift and change’ in engaging the disengaged?

How do we support people who are not connected to an educational institution to reconnect with education and life long learning?

Issues related to Indigenous Education and technology in education have similar parallels and issues.

Cross Disciplinary Learning in New Learning Spaces

Stephen Inglis & Anne Harvey - FutureSACE
Harvey.anne3@saugov.sa.gov.au

Examples of Flexible Learning offered in the South Australian Certificate in Education (SACE)

Extension Studies – research study – design their own studies – extended learning initiatives – Self directed Community Learning:
Value preferred ways of learning, student initiated and self directed learning, fosters independent and collaborative learning, students able to investigate an area of personal interest or pursue a passion, deep learning or cross disciplinary, involves a teacher, a community mentor and the student.

Step up Community Learning
Accrediting / Recognising community learning of students as a part of their SACE

Cross-disciplinary studies to be offered Future SACE

The Investigational Practicals

Peter Geelen – Booleroo Centre District School
Peter.geelen@booleroods.sa.edu.au

Facilitated approach to maths and science lessons based around 14 ‘investigational practicals’ which are cheap and easy to set up and maintain.

The Successful Teacher – Educator and/or Entertainer

Tom Stone – Trinity College Senior
Tom.stone@trinity.sa.gov.au

Recognises the need to entertain as well as empathise with learners
Relating to the learner and relating the content to the learner is very important
Golden rules for effective teaching : Respect, relevance, feedback, entertainment, enthusiasm, engage
‘When a teacher sits down – a student lies down’
“Only the mediocre are always at their best”

Why do students remain engaged at Windsor Gardens Vocational College?

Laura Luongo – Windsor Gardens Vocational College
Laura.Longo@wgvc.sa.edu.au

Offering a refreshing approach to Secondary Education which is reflecting 21^st century approach to learning – offering ‘university’ and ‘vocational’ pathways

Switching on the **lights** around Employability Skills

We held our first South Australian Employability Skills Community of Practice (SAESCoP) Forum last week and some very interesting things came to light. We discovered that as a Community of Practice our 'common knowledge' about Employability Skills was that:

- the common thinking around Employability Skills within this group, and within the Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector we suspect, was that we don't have a common understanding of the current thinking of how Employability Skills are to be delivered and assessed in new and revised training package:
- we have different levels of understanding of the term "Employability Skills" in VET, and have different conceptions of how Employability Skills should be implemented in VET
- some of our trainers will need to have their own Employability Skills further 'developed'
- we agree it is very important to support our clients to develop and assess their own Employability Skills, but developing Employability Skills is a long term, lifelong experience
- there is no 'accountability' in whether Employability Skills are being implemented effectively into VET ie Employability Skills are not audited, so will trainers bother changing what they are currently doing to incorporate them?
- to be truly effective, Employability Skills need to implemented at a systemic, Program Area/Work Team level, and ideally would be driven by the Quality Assurance Group (QAG) in the TAFEs - but they will require adequate time, money, resources and authority to support their trainers in this process
- Educational Managers should be working with their QAG reps, helping them roll out new and revised training models which explicitly incorporate Employability Skills, and not wait for this process to be managed up by the trainers
- the Industry Skills Boards should be taking a collaborative role in the embedding of Employability Skills and working in unison with trainers
- there needs to be a whole of organisation strategy to communicate the importance of Employability Skills to clients (and staff), and how the organisation plans to do this - (see Swinburne TAFE's approach)

In order to effectively and explicitly embed the development and assessment of Employability Skills of our clients VET REQUIRES key stakeholders within our organisations and in industry to provide the leadership and support for a whole of organisation approach to Employability Skills, as this can not by done via a trainer by trainer roll out approach.

Does your Training Organisation have the foresight, and even more importantly, the ability, to manage this change?

The vision of SAESCoP is to switch on a few lights along the Employability Skills pathway in VET.

Notes from the SA Training Forum Sector – 26/06/08

Brian Cunningham, Chief Executive Officer, DFEEST
SA Skill Strategy for the Future

It’s about how change is managed

2006 Statistics for South Australia
Student numbers - University - 51,000 vs VET - 122,000 (of which TAFE SA - 78,000)
20% of VET AQF Levels are Diploma

Required – 2008-2018 an additional 133,000 workers for newly created jobs + 206,000 workers to replace retiring workers = 424,000 potential qualifications over next 10 years

Need a paradigm change in the way we delivery training

Our quality of training is excellent – world class – but break through improvements required to respond to demands of industry

Skills for the 21^st Century
- New Training & Skills Development Act (going through parliament as we ‘speak’)
Training and Skills Commission – 5 year SA Skills Workforce Development Plan – which will be updated annually
- Review of Industry Skills Board – ISB’s need to take a lead role in training
- SA Skills Strategy – TAFE SA needs to be more responsive – was created for training needs of the 1970’s. Will be operating in a more competitive market for public training funds.

At any one time in SA:
10,000 job vacancies with:
- 40,200 unemployed people
- 95,100 who want work
- 117,200 who want more work

Federal Government role to fund training - $1.9 billion over 4 years – For SA by 2012 – 17,500 place for new entrants, 29,300 places for upskilling & retraining, $70 million contestable training funding – from 25% to 50% contestable by 2012 – a market driven training model – SA Purchasing Plan = State Non-contestable funding + State & Federal Contestable funding from 2009.

By 2009
Blueprint for Contestability
TAFE SA Reforms

Dr Jane Figgis, Director AAAJ Consulting Group
Innovation in the VET Sector

Why is innovation so important?
“Swampy Lowlands” – the environment where educators need to work
- major influences/drivers of innovation in VET has been Reframing the Future and the Australian Flexible Learning Framework
- Advanced technical skills still required at Cert IV & Diploma, as well as the managerial skills
- the importance of learner controlled/centred environments
- project based learning works with disengaged learners
- RPL – generic questionnaire to draw out skills of learner before enrolling – and then designing the training around the skills gaps
- valuing informal learning in a mix with formal learning
- understanding the ‘cultural’ of a workplace
- tools of technology – the ‘e’ can not be separated from learning in e-learning – all encompassing
- reflective practice or ‘Stop and Think’ – content of learning is changing – concerns about quality of learning – RPL helping to improve individualizing learning – using e-learning tools – need to have recent workplace experience
- take the teacher out of the equation – teacher and student working together to achieve outcomes

Any learning environment has 3 components:

Tasks - tasks for the learner which are real, authentic and challenging,

Support - the support given to the learner through the building of the relationships between the teacher and the learners as well as the learner and fellow learners; - ‘coaching’ the learners; - Mixing the different qualification levels together to undertake learning ie Cert 3 students being mentored by Diploma students; - listening to learner feedback

Learning resources – situational/scenario based learning, role play, technology,

Where does assessment fit in here?

Reflective practice = people being strategic and looking at the big picture

Embedding innovation – local to skills, knowledge and attitude of what’s needed to provide a learning environment for their learners – don’t have a lateral spread of innovation in our educational/training environments.

Critical Reflection is paramount to being innovative – Brookefield

Don’t be afraid to do something new.

What will you be expected to be delivering in the next 4-5 years for your industry? And what will you need to do to achieve this?

If you ask the right questions – you’ll find the answers you are looking for.

“You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps” & the “art of building bridges whilst were are crossing them”

DECS DFEEST “School to Work” Strategy
Tanya Rogers, Jillian Blight, Kim Clayton: DECS

Innovative Community Action Networks (ICANs) and Alternative Learning Option Programs (ALOP)

Career Development is driving the “School to Work” Strategy:
- self awareness
- learning and work exploration
- career building – employability skills

Australian Blueprint for Career Development

Australian Career Development Studies (ACDS)

Personal Learning Planning (PLP)

Problem based and Project based learning opportunities which include contextualized literacy and numeracy skills

Future SACE will commence in 2010, with the PLP unit commencing in 2009

Some thoughts:
- what are the expectations of young people in the workplace?
- workplace systems which are more 'people centred' are required to retain staff
- What role does small business play in career pathways?
- increased need to engage educators to participate in upskilling and reskilling processes
- why are proving your existing abilities so difficult? why don't we value the skills someone brings with them?

This is What We Want! Holistic Workplace Training & Assessment aligned to Business Needs & Values (Enterprise Training)
Rob Conwell, National Pharmacies

- Start mapping skills sets to workplace skills and needs
- individualised training programs
- Keeping good training records for employees helps with RPL processes
- Assess first – Train later = reduced training costs
- The term RPL is not a well received ‘concept’, the term ‘skills recognition’ is better received
- Achieving RPL in one qualification encourages people to undertake training in a higher level
- important to celebrate and recognize when individuals complete their certificate
- moving away from calling workplace training by a qualification title
- industry best practice – units mapped to skills sets; client needs & organizational skills; included employability skills and industry skills; RTO workplace trainers and assessors
- industry want to know how training will benefit their ‘bottomline’- workplace training really does improve the bottomline
- an automated induction and tracking systems has been successful – Manta-tas – Training Administration Software - Prodata Solutions – currently looking at how this system will align to AVETMISS – allows security settings which manages who can see different levels of information

Career Development – what, where, how for SA?
Careers SA – Framework to Facility (SA Works – linking people, skills and jobs)
Ian Buchanan, Drew Thomas: DFEEST

What are the competencies needed to manage your career? – Australian Blueprint for Career Development

What bother with Career Development – benefits – economic, social inclusion, individual

Do 'curriculums' need to GO to move forward?

A timely tweet from Leo Gaggl led me to a very interesting blog post by Dave Cormier called "Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum". This article relates really well to my previous post called 'Co-op Knowledge vs Collective Knowledge' - but it also highlights the question:

Do 'curriculums' need to GO to move forward?

Are prescriptive curriculum documents holding back educators ability to more forward into a 'social/community' approach to learning - whereby the 'instructor' provides:

"an introduction to an existing professional community in which students may participate—to offer not just a window, but an entry point into an existing learning community"

through the use of online educational network?

"Through involvement in multiple communities where new information is being assimilated and tested, educators can begin to apprehend the moving target that is knowledge in the modern learning environment."

Are we too regulated to develop rich educational environments?

Co-op Knowledge vs Collective Knowledge

A lot of time and money is being poured into the Australian Flexible Learning Framework's (the Framework) Learning Object Respository Network (LORN).

Initially LORN was created based on a 'co-op' model where the States and Territories could share digital learning objects suitable for the Vocational Education and Training (VET) Sector.

But I wonder whether Learning Object Repositories are still appropriate in a world of :

- web 2.0 technologies and user created content,
- an increased need for 21st Century skills - including digital literacy skills, and
- a move away from teacher centred learning to facilitated learning

Compare a Learning Object Repository to WikiEducator which is "an evolving community intended for the collaborative:

• planning of education projects linked with the development of free content;
• development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning;
• work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs.
• networking on funding proposals developed as free content."

Some may argue that that Learning Object Respositories increase efficiencies:

• by reducing the replication of resource development, and
  
• improved quality (read 'consistency') in training

But compare this to the complexities and expense of establishing and maintaining the Respository, which supports the 'knowledge is scarce' school of thinking around copyright and licensing.

Perhaps there is a need for these respositories in the short term, as a brick in the bridge which will help the vast majority of educators cross into the world of using technology in education and truly understand the power of collective intelligence?

Will LORN be 'obsolete' before it's fully functional?