For those living and working in rural areas, the importance of providing genuine pathways to skilled employment for local populations, particularly young-people, is paramount. We understand in great detail, the challenges of ageing rural populations and structural adjustments. This is more than just a “microcosm” of the challenges facing our national economy.
Working in the field of skills development, labour markets and rural and regional planning, the nature of this model of collaboration and its result, has genuinely raised my interest and admiration.
I have had the honour of attending the dual official opening[s] of the $AUD 11.3 Million dollar, Central Ranges Trade Training Centre, a uniquecollaboration of nine Government and Catholic secondary schools spanning a potential student population of some 3,500 across the shires of Mitchell and Murrindindi and the City of Whittlesea.
Southern Hub – Whittlesea
I say “unique”with genuine intent. It is rare [at least in my 30 years of experience] to see a level of collaboration, governance and coordination, that sees a number of individual schools, TAFE Colleges [Goulburn Ovens and Kangan Batman], Industry partners and a community-based planning network [Central Ranges LLEN] agree to fore-go individual funding, to maximise and pool available funds to establish a distributed network of infrastructure and human resources to supply a quality and depth of training opportunity that is clearly greater than the some of its parts.
Today in Seymour, the “Northern Hub” was officially opened by the Federal Minister for Skills and Training, The Honourable Brendan O’Connor and the Member for McEwen, Mr. Rob Mitchell. This completed the “bookend” of the opening of the Southern Hub, at Whittlesea Secondary College, just over a week ago. This complements the two other minor hubs, established and on-stream in 2012 at Alexandra Secondary College and Assumption College Kilmore.
Central Ranges TTC – Northern Hub – Seymour
In this expanded regional network, there are schools from the Government and Catholic sectors, their key leaders, school Principals, have chosen to take on a level of planning complexity and responsibility that is not easily reconciled with their “day-to-day” core-business, yet is clearly in the best interests of young people and employers throughout the region to gain access to training facilities and high-level qualifications in key areas of long-term skill-shortage.
Engineering Students – Seymour
Northern Hub – CRTTC
Broadford Secondary College, as lead school in the consortium, coordinated and managed the five year project, yet received no capital investment. Seymour College and Whittlesea Secondary College, provided technical, programmatic and planning expertise and shared this with all schools and partners. This is what genuine leadership is, at the community level, these leaders have taken responsibility to build something for a region and the young people within it, well-beyond their individual school gates…
The other partners, specialists, governments and individuals have all contributed, having recognised the depth of collaboration and commitment of this consortium. To also complete such a complex task on budget and ahead-of-time, certainly challenges the stereotypical view of the public sector.
A genuine model of cluster-collaboration with concrete, long-term success. Congratulations to all involved.
Links
The Central Ranges Trade Training Centre Consortium
Can a 3D printer cool the Planet? Stay with me on this..
As we once againhear that the 1990 IPCC Climate modelling for the planet is “on trend” or “coming true”, I ponder the relationship between some of the major policy challenges Australia faces and see opportunity where at present we seem only to be experiencing confusion and much hand-wringing. It appears as clear as it was in 1990 that climate is the context for all other policy work.
There is no doubt that past and current political leaders have dropped the ball, and if my understanding of the research is correct, we have already locked in a temperature rise that current political leaders appear too timid or intellectually incapable of addressing.
We need greater strategic collaboration between education, IT, manufacturing, workforce and environmental portfolios than ever before. This is a challenge for all levels of government.
You might ask what the Climate, Australia’s NBN, Employment and Education policies have to do with one another? … Well, that’s my point.
There appears little or no effort [or perhaps ability] to truly connect some of the major policy challenges facing the country and the globe. Australia, as a nation, is very well placed to respond to and lead the changes required to address the challenges of global climate change and simultaneously address the current national and global debates about education and skills for modern communities and their economies.
There is [rightly] much concern in policy circles about the skills and opportunities that will be available to young people in the future. There is also, [rightly] concern about the relative level of skills and employability within the Australian workforce and the competitive advantage [or lack there-of] of the Nation over the coming decades.
If one looks at [for example] the current political debates surrounding teacher salaries and school performance, infrastructure spending for the National Broadband Network, the tense debates on Murray Darling Basin and particularly the ongoing critical debate about the necessary ”adjustments” or ”transformations” required in the Australian manufacturing industry, it would be easy to be overwhelmed by any one issue and you would certainly be excused for not relating one issue to the next, let alone, the debate about climate change.
I was struck by a piece from The Economist in 2011:
More than 20% of the output of 3D printers is now final products rather than prototypes, according to Terry Wohlers, who runs a research firm specialising in the field. He predicts that this will rise to 50% by 2020.
This got me thinking about the pending revolution in manufacturing and the preparedness [or not] of our Education and Industry sectors.
Concepts of school or home-based manufacturing seem fanciful, but for those of us that have witnessed the changes in the printing industry, it is not such a big leap to see what is coming.
Schools, universities and their IT departments were some of the earliest adopters of “new” dot-matrix and “desktop” printing technologies. We saw a profound change in an established “heavy” industry over just two decades, and we are still witnessing the fallout from those changes in the news and media fields today.
I have no doubt we will see a similar adoption and change in the coming decade, although this time, the change will be across the entire PROCESS of manufacturing.
Our educators, schools and universities are more important than ever before.
Consider the recent news.
In February of this year, an 83 year old woman had her lower jaw replaced, using a jaw that the surgeon PRINTED in a 3D printer.
As recently as last month, GE Aviation, part of the world’s biggest manufacturing group, bought a privately owned company called Morris Technologies. Morris Technologies is expert in 3D printing equipment and will be printing parts for jet engines. [The Economist]
A new start-up company, FormLabs, has even announced a high quality DESKTOP 3D printer in development.
It has been quite routine for about a decade for prototyping pieces in 3D printers. Architects, Engineers, Medical researchers, Physicists, Chemists and many others are all familiar with this field.
This is what 3D printing looks like:
Conceptually, 3D manufacturing becomes an additive more than subtractive process, thus less raw materials, [lower carbon footprint] and the benefit of unitization [less parts] is realised [because each item can be altered all within software, there is no re-tooling, or in many cases, any tooling [beyond the 3D printer and operator]. This fundamentally changes the nature of the enterprise, at every level, from supply, logistics, quality control, marketing… You name it, it changes.
The competitive advantage becomes almost solely the skill of the user; their ability to respond to market need and their ability to protect their intellectual property.
When one combines this with a highly trained and skilled workforce that has access to computing and bandwidth resources, you create the circumstances for genuine innovation.
Consider for a moment the major inputs required for an economy based on virtualised manufacturing.
The education, skills and collaborative abilities of the new manufacturers will be paramount. Their access to bandwidth will be central to their viability. Their relationships with research institutions will be critical. These manufacturers will not require some/many of the industrial-age inputs that have produced such carbon-intensive enterprises that now threaten the planet. This is one of the few times when the use of the word “revolution” could be genuinely justified and not considered hyperbole.
Innovation clusters and the ability to network strategically will be the norm.
In last months Technology Spectator, Thomas Birtchnell and John Urry envisioned four ways that 3D printing could change the world. They posited four alternate futures:
Home Factories – Where everyone has a 3D Printer.. They print all the “STUFF” they want. They buy designs online, trade in designs, even make their own designs. “Shops” with “stuff” disappear. Amazon has nothing to deliver.. This might seem fanciful, however, we all know how ridiculous a printer in every home seemed in 1981?? I knew lots of people that worked in typing pools?
Print Shops – Manufacturing “returns” to places such as the UK, USA or Australia. Efficiency gains and new business models create a renaissance. Again, this might seem impossible, given the “religion of the outsourced”, but consider an announcement from Time Cook, CEO of Apple this week..
Fab labs – Communities of interest, clusters of innovation, local or regional manufacturing hubs, hinged on open-source technology and skills. The high-tech “farmers markets” of the next decade.
A 3D Bubble – The 3D industry collapses, and remains a niche, specialist endeavour with little or no take-up. [Given integration of policy by governments, this might be more likely than not??]
I would suggest that any combination of the first three “futures” suggested by Birtchnell and Urry are desirable.
Australia seems particularly well placed to take advantage of the benefits in such changes to the manufacturing process if it is able to harmonise its key strategic public policy platforms in education, IT infrastructure, manufacturing and climate.
I think a 3D printer in a classroom just might cool the the planet!
At a time when Gender equity is so prominent in much media coverage, both within Australia and across the Globe, it is also sobering to consider the structural challenges faced by girls entering the workforce and adult-hood for the first time here in Victoria.
This graph shows Vet is Schools [VETiS] enrolments for Girls as a ratio of the Boys enrolments. 0% would mean there is an equal percentage of both boys and girls enrolled. A negative percentage [i.e. Building and Construction] shows girls are under-represented. A positive percentage [i.e. Community Services and Health] shows girls are over-represented.
Gender Bias – VETiS – Victoria 2011
Where are future opportunities for girls?
Where are the proposed cuts being made?
The current and proposed cuts to TAFE programmes, listed here [PDF] by the AEU, further enforces an already structural disadvantage for girls and young women. Compounding rural and regional disadvantage and the already stark labour-market inequities that have occurred over the last twenty years, there is little or no defence in my view for the changes as I understand them.
These changes do not encourage or address the growing lack of job-ready individuals and further solidifies a structural bias that I doubt few inside “urban” policy contexts seem to really understand. Given the responses to these announcements, it does not appear Gender issues were considered appropriately. This is a matter of both social cohesion and stark regional economic development that should be reconsidered with the highest priority.
There is nothing like good public policy to improve regional and rural competitiveness; these proposed cuts are nothing like good public policy.
A collection of vocational education and training (VET) related research and policy documents from various regions of the world are now available online on VOCED, including many of the older print-based copies.
VOCED is the international research database with over 35,000 documents available.
On social work training. ‘Degrees in social work are viewed as being “difficult to fail” – a reputation that is unacceptable, a select committee of MPs has said.’
When I taught on social work courses, on which the majority of other tutors were former social workers, they were often exemplary tutors. They brought all their professional skills to bear in counselling and supporting students, and were enormously sensitive to their difficulties and any form of discrimination to which they might potentially be subject. Also true to their professional background, they acted as advocates for their “clients”. So it was that our assessment boards were interminable affairs, as tutors produced reams of evidence of extenuating circumstances to argue that students who had failed, or failed to submit work, should proceed to the next year of the course, or be granted extensions to produce the required work for completion.
[Note; I left social work education fifteen years ago. I have confirmed in the last six months that in at least three not untypical programmes, nothing has changed in this respect.]
Recently [2001, but this is the same borough in which the Baby Peter case happened – my link -BC], the Director of Social Services for the London Borough of Haringey admitted to the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié (a child killed by her aunt and partner who were supposed to be looking after her) that some of her staff had not read the Departmental policies and procedures on child abuse because, although qualified, they could not read very well. [Primary Source reference here see pp 77-78]*
The National Quality Council has identified five Action Groups to work on achieving 5 priorities for 2009. They are: Vet Products for the 21st Century, Quality of Assessment Action Group, Skills for Sustainability Action Group, International VET Action Group, and National Consistency Action Group.
New information has been added to the VET FEE-HELP web pages.
This booklet gives the most current information about accessing VET FEE-HELP assistance to pay for all or part of VET tuition fees. It is applicable to full fee-paying students in one or more of the following courses: a diploma, an advanced diploma, a graduate certificate, and a graduate diploma.
Nicholas Gruen draws my attention to a piece on school completion by CIS researcher Peter Saunders (based on a longer paper here) [Broken Link – see below], who argues:
Three-quarters of students currently stay to year 12, and most of them benefit from higher earnings and better job prospects as a result. But this doesn’t mean the remaining quarter would enjoy these same outcomes if they too stayed on, for the more we extend schooling, the deeper we delve down the ability pool.
