Brotherhood of St Laurence

Response:

The Brotherhood of St Laurence welcomes the intention behind Jobs and Skills Australia’s tripartite advisory body. Collaboration and the leverage of diverse expertise is essential to creating long-term, sustainable, and just workforce development solutions. Without the regular inclusion of the voices of organisations who work closely with those outside of the training system, key insights about how to include and enable hard to reach communities will not be gained by JSA. In designing a more inclusive structure and consultative approach to include a broader set of expert voices, Jobs and Skills Australia should consider adopting a quadripartite rather than tripartite approach. Too often workforce development policy results in sub-optimal outcomes due to a narrow focus on demand-led interventions, which place the barriers to education and employment outside of their scope. 

The proposed stakeholder representation does not appear to be significantly different from existing consultation and representation mechanisms. The collaborative capability of the JSA would be expanded and strengthened by the formalised inclusion of representation from civil society. Where education providers, industry, and unions bring an expertise and perspective on future workforce development and the development of policies which are outcome-focused, civil society stakeholders (eg. not-for-profits, charities, support services) bring a much-needed expertise and insight regarding the point at which existing policy has failed to include and enable disadvantaged, long-term unemployed and marginalised job seekers and learners.

Response:

To be successful and to ensure the JSA reaches its potential as an advisory body it needs to do more than duplicate existing analytical functions of other similar state-based bodies. There are several organisations and institutions within Australia which already provide strong workforce forecasting and labour market analytical functions. To address the existing weaknesses in Australia’s workforce development practices and skills system, JSA needs to do more than just duplicate this existing function. It is also important that JSA’s works draw on more than just workforce forecasting and training activity datasets to analyse public policy and inform fragmented demand-side and supply-side advice to government. A reliance on analyses of large datasets as a method to inform policy development is too narrow in the scope of its insight and therefore limited in its impact. For example, understanding the efficacies and inefficacies of the training system for disadvantaged job seekers, datasets on training activity and completion rates do little to illuminate the implications of structural barriers, trainer and institutional capability, training product appropriateness or impact of work integrated learning on the pay-off of training investment. There is a significant opportunity for JSA to take a leading role in informing workforce development policy with a wholistic, rigorous, and multidisciplinary approach. Five key principles which could guide this role are:

1.	Leveraging diverse sources of data, including a balance of quantitative and qualitative data that illuminates point in time and longitudinal patterns.

2.	Seeking insights into the outcomes and impacts of training on learners and job seekers, to understand the impact of funding approaches, qualification reform and delivery methods on the ways in which learners convert training to secure and upwardly mobile employment. 

3.	Including cross-disciplinary expertise in the analysis of evidence, through intentional and on-going engagement with independent scholarly and applied vocational, adult education and tertiary education researchers and academics, through formalised expert advisory panels aligned with JSA projects and programs of analysis. 

4.	Enabling transparency and accountability through the regular and timely publication of data for public access and interrogation.

5.	Adopting a life-course lens which acknowledges the shifting patterns of skills acquisition as job seekers and workers build expertise and specialisation. 

Response:

The Brotherhood of St Laurence welcomes the proposed expansion of JSA’s functions to enable enhanced cohort level analysis. Strong outcomes for all Australians will rely on understanding the labour market needs of specific cohorts, as well as cohort-specific barriers to education and employment. The successful execution of this will rely upon JSA establishing and maintaining relationships with cohort specific experts and networks. It is essential that these networks possess a membership which is reflective of the cohort itself, and directly amplify the voices and experiences of the cohort they represent. To avoid duplication of effort and to ensure advice to government is reflective of a breadth of available insight from the diverse labour market and training contexts across the country, the JSA should develop direct and agile collaborative relationships with equivalent authorities in the states and territories. A standing advisory group, including senior representatives from the data analytics branches of each state and territory departments responsible for workforce development and training, alongside representation from NCVER and DEWR, would enable a productive exchange of knowledge and capability. 

Response:

As emphasised in response to question 1 above, a quadripartite rather than tripartite approach to partnership and consultation is needed to ensure the JSA is working with and basing advice on the breadth of expertise relevant to addressing the current weaknesses in Australia’s workforce development and skills system policies. There are three key mechanisms which together would enable JSA to engage parties in meaningful collaborative relationships to enable thorough and rigorous evidence making and analysis. 

Firstly, the formation of project advisory groups for major projects should comprise of representatives of quadripartite partners, as well as VET educator and learner experts relevant to the scope of the study. Secondly, research units and research centres within Australian tertiary institutions should be commissioned to undertake short cycle qualitative work. This approach to commissioning will have the benefit of enhancing cohort-level analysis, developing and leveraging specific regional and place-based insights, and building much-needed skills system specific research capability within tertiary institutions. Commissioning this type of research from experts embedded in both the disciplinary and place-based expertise can address some of the perceived and actual genericism that has emerged in research commissioned through consultants. 

Finally, JSA should use a range of consultation and public dissemination strategies, including roundtables, webinars, digital newsletters and regular public reporting to engage with its stakeholder network. These strategies will be strengthened by leveraging existing VET advocacy and VET research networks (eg: AVETRA, TDA, CCA, etc.) for accessing the breadth and depth of their sector-specific audiences and memberships.

The utility and success of these mechanisms rely on the routine adoption and implementations of good governance and communications principles and approaches that include:

•	Opportunity for the expert representatives identified above to inform the co-design of studies prior to commissioning and/or development and implementation.

•	Clear terms of reference and role clarity for quadripartite partners and expert advisors. 

•	Formalisation within project timelines and delivery plans for the inclusion of expert advisors in the analysis and interpretation of data, and dissemination of findings.

Response:

There is a significant paucity of longitudinal data on post-educational outcomes for learners and job seekers. Longitudinal data, including cohort specific studies and randomised control trials, could offer significant insight into the impact of skills mixes, curriculum, and methods of training delivery upon short, medium, and long-term employment and career growth for training graduates. However, capability and resourcing for studies of this type have been eroded within non-government research institutions. The unique position of JSA means that it is ideally located to liaise with national and state-level bodies to engage in the collection, analysis, and dissemination of this data. Though a long-term project, this would be invaluable in shaping educational reform and strengthening skills and training policy. 

JSA is well-placed to not only collect new types of data to build a stronger evidence base to inform policy, but also to contribute to the ongoing development of the capability of Australian VET research at large. JSA can take a strong leadership role in the sector, working collaboratively with VET research institutions to build the capacity of both parties. This will strengthen the research and evidence base of JSA, but also the research, policy advice, and advocacy of existing VET institutions. 

Response:

It is essential to the success of JSA that it engages with a broad range of stakeholders to inform its research and advice. This does not just include engagement with a broad range of industries, but also a broad level of employer and worker representatives within an industry. One of the weaknesses of systems which rely too heavily on representative bodies for their insight is the several layers of separation between national-level representatives and employers, workers, and managers at ground level. This is particularly important if JSA seeks to understand place-specific conditions, concerns, and barriers to education and employment. 

On-going workforce transformations, including digital, automation and climate adaptation transformations, have cross-industry implications and will continue to transform the shape and boundaries of occupations and career trajectories. The nature of cross occupational and cross industry skills profiles and ideal skills mixes can be overlooked by existing industry and occupational specific analyses. Place-based and regional analysis could further strengthen cross-industry insight, building JSA’s capacity for strong spatial understanding of workforce development needs and training investment advice.

Response:

With the breadth and depth of expertise and data analysis enabled through the JSA, it is important that those insights are widely and regularly shared with stakeholders working within the training system. We encourage JSA to adopt and resource a substantial program of public dissemination of its training products and reports. This needs to include intentional engagement with and presentation to research units and VET researcher networks within tertiary institutions, to build familiarity with and opportunities for pressure testing of new JSA data products. 

Response:

In designing and building its data visualisation products and platforms, JSA should avoid an over-reliance on approaches that rely solely on statistical data and statistical analysis, as has been the trend of comparable national bodies over the last few decades. The analysis of large datasets is important and needs to remain a core feature of work undertaking to inform skills and training policy. However, without contextualisation and interpretation through the lens of place, lived experience and qualitative understanding of the factors shaping working lives, a sustained reliance on statistics to decide the reform of a complex human service system like the VET system, will reinforce existing weaknesses and roadblocks. 

As an example of how large statistical datasets can be contextualised through place and cohort specific conditions, the Brotherhood of St Laurence has developed two proof of concept prototypes of a ‘Youth Opportunity Compass’, with place-based partners within the National Youth Employment Opportunity. The Compass dashboards, developed in partnership with local stakeholders designing and implementing solutions to youth unemployment, bring together demographic, housing, educational and labour market data that are specific to a labour force region and to 15-24 year old cohort. The Compass is currently being scaled to an additional 5 sites across the country. The Brotherhood would welcome an opportunity to present the tool to JSA. 

Response:

The short-term role of the JSA in the context of Treasury’s full-employment white paper:
 
Within the JSA discussion paper, the statement of functions includes an intention to look at insecure employment. However, there does not appear to be any consideration of ‘decent jobs or ‘quality jobs’. The inference here is that JSA will undertake skills forecasting with the assumption that labour markets do and should be the core determinants of skills and training investment and VET delivery. We encourage the JSA to adopt a more proactive mission for the building of industries that provide decent, skilled, sustainable jobs and career trajectories for all Australians. This should include more intentional consideration of the broader social and cultural purposes of vocational education, particularly for those who have not completed secondary education and have no other post-compulsory education attainment. 
A commitment to ensuring decent jobs would require Government, union, community, education and other stakeholders to work collaboratively with industry to invest in industries, jobs and learning that provide rewarding, sustainable careers.